Lk  177 

-  H33 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2019  with  funding  from 
Princeton  Theological  Seminary  Library 


https://archive.org/details/riseofuniversitiOOhask 


BROWN  UNIVERSITY.  THE  COLVER  LECTURES,  1923 


XvV’ 
V' 


!  MA 

v> 

\?£l  1 


THE  ^  i 

RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


EY  / 

CHARLES  HOMER  HASKINS 

GURNEY  PROFESSOR  OF  HISTORY  AND  POLITICAL  SCIENCE 
DEAN  OF  THE  GRADUATE  SCHOOL  OF  ARTS  AND  SCIENCES 
HARVARD  UNIVERSITY 


NEW  YORK 

HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 


1923 


Copyright,  1923 
By  Brown  University 


PRINTED  IN 

UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


TO  MY  STUDENTS 
IN  THREE  UNIVERSITIES 
1888-1923 


The  Colver  lectureship  is  provided  by  a 
fund  of  $10,000  presented  to  the  Uni¬ 
versity  by  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Jesse  L.  Rosenberger 
of  Chicago  in  memory  of  Mrs.  Rosenberger’s 
father,  Charles  K.  Colver  of  the  class  of  1842. 
The  following  sentences  from  the  letter  ac¬ 
companying  the  gift  explain  the  purposes  of 
the  foundation :  — 

44  It  is  desired  that,  so  far  as  possible,  for 
these  lectures  only  subjects  of  particular  im¬ 
portance  and  lecturers  eminent  in  scholarship 
or  of  other  marked  qualifications  shall  be 
chosen.  It  is  desired  that  the  lectures  shall 
be  distinctive  and  valuable  contributions  to 
human  knowledge,  known  for  their  quality 
rather  than  their  number.  Income,  or  portions 
of  income,  not  used  for  lectures  may  be  used 
for  the  publication  of  any  of  the  lectures 
deemed  desirable  to  be  so  published.” 

Charles  Kendrick  Colver  (1821-1896)  was 
a  graduate  of  Brown  University  of  the  class 
of  1842.  The  necrologist  of  the  University 
wrote  of  him:  44  He  was  distinguished  for  his 
broad  and  accurate  scholarship,  his  unswerving 
personal  integrity,  championship  of  truth,  and 
obedience  to  God  in  his  daily  life.  He  was 
severely  simple  and  unworldly  in  character.” 

The  lectures  now  published  in  this  series 
are :  — 

1916 

The  American  Conception  of  Liberty  and  Gov¬ 
ernment ,  by  Frank  Johnson  Goodnow, 
LL.D.,  President  of  Johns  Hopkins  Uni¬ 
versity. 

•  • 

Vll 


S 


1917 

Medical  Research  and  Human  Welfare ,  by 
W.  W.  Keen,  M.D.,  LL.D.  (Brown),  Emeri¬ 
tus  Professor  of  Surgery,  Jefferson  Medical 
College,  Philadelphia. 

1918 

The  Responsible  State:  A  Reexamination  of 
Fundamental  Political  Doctrines  in  the  Light 
of  World  War  and  the  Menace  of  Anarchism , 
by  Franklin  Henry  Giddings,  LL.D.,  Pro¬ 
fessor  of  Sociology  and  the  History  of 
Civilization  in  Columbia  University;  some¬ 
time  Professor  of  Political  Science  in  Bryn 
Mawr  College. 

1919 

Democracy:  Discipline:  Peace ,  by  William 
Roscoe  Thayer. 

1920 

Plymouth  and  the  Pilgrims .  by  Arthur  Lord. 

1921 

Human  Life  as  the  Biologist  Sees  It ,  by  Vernon 
Kellogg,  Sc.D.,  LL.D.,  Secretary,  National 
Research  Council ;  sometime  Professor  in 
Stanford  University. 

1922 

The  Rise  of  Universities ,  by  Charles  H.  Has¬ 
kins,  Ph.D.,  LL.D.,  Litt.D.,  Gurney  Pro¬ 
fessor  of  History  and  Political  Science, 
Dean  of  the  Graduate  School  of  Arts  and 

Sciences,  in  Harvard  University. 

•  •  • 

Vlll 


CONTENTS 


PAGES 

I.  The  Earliest  Universities  ....  3-36 

Introduction .  3 

Bologna  and  the  South .  10 

Paris  and  the  North .  19 

The  mediaeval  inheritance.  ...  31 

II.  The  Mediaeval  Professor  .  .  .  .37-78 

Studies  and  textbooks .  37 

Teaching  and  examinations  ...  54 

Academic  status  and  freedom  .  .  68 

III.  The  Mediaeval  Student  ....  79-126 

Sources  of  information .  79 

Student  manuals .  89 

Student  letters . 102 

Student  poetry . Ill 

Conclusion . 120 

Bibliographical  Note . 127-130 

Index  . . 131-134 


lx 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


THE 

RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


I 

THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 

Universities,  like  cathedrals  and  par¬ 
liaments,  are  a  product  of  the  Middle 
Ages.  The  Greeks  and  the  Romans, 
strange  as  it  may  seem,  had  no  univer¬ 
sities  in  the  sense  in  which  the  word  has 
been  used  for  the  past  seven  or  eight  cen¬ 
turies.  They  had  higher  education,  but 
the  terms  are  not  synonymous.  Much  of 
their  instruction  in  law,  rhetoric,  and  phi¬ 
losophy  it  would  be  hard  to  surpass,  but 
it  was  not  organized  into  the  form  of  per¬ 
manent  institutions  of  learning.  A  great 
teacher  like  Socrates  gave  no  diplomas; 
if  a  modern  student  sat  at  his  feet  for 
three  months,  he  would  demand  a  certifi- 

3 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


cate,  something  tangible  and  external 
to  show  for  it  —  an  excellent  theme,  by 
the  way,  for  a  Socratic  dialogue.  Only  in 
the  twelfth  and  thirteenth  centuries  do 
there  emerge  in  the  world  those  features 
of  organized  education  with  which  we  are 
most  familiar,  all  that  machinery  of  in¬ 
struction  represented  by  faculties  and  col¬ 
leges  and  courses  of  study,  examinations 
and  commencements  and  academic  de¬ 
grees.  In  all  these  matters  we  are  the 
heirs  and  successors,  not  of  Athens  and 
Alexandria,  but  of  Paris  and  Bologna. 

The  contrast  between  these  earliest 
universities  and  those  of  today  is  of  course 
broad  and  striking.  Throughout  the  pe¬ 
riod  of  its  origins  the  mediaeval  univer¬ 
sity  had  no  libraries,  laboratories,  or  mu¬ 
seums,  no  endowment  or  buildings  of  its 
own ;  it  could  not  possibly  have  met  the  re¬ 
quirements  of  the  Carnegie  Foundation! 
As  an  historical  text-book  from  one  of  the 
youngest  of  American  universities  tells 
us,  with  an  unconscious  touch  of  local 
color,  it  had  “  none  of  the  attributes  of  the 

4 


THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 

material  existence  which  with  us  are  so 
self-evident.”  The  mediaeval  university 
was,  in  the  fine  old  phrase  of  Pasquier, 
“  built  of  men  ”  —  batie  en  liommes.  Such 
a  university  had  no  board  of  trustees  and 
published  no  catalogue ;  it  had  no  student 
societies  —  except  so  far  as  the  university 
itself  was  fundamentally  a  society  of  stu¬ 
dents —  no  college  journalism,  no  dra¬ 
matics,  no  athletics,  none  of  those  “  out¬ 
side  activities  ”  which  are  the  chief  excuse 
for  inside  inactivity  in  the  American 
college. 

And  yet,  great  as  these  differences  are, 
the  fact  remains  that  the  university  of  the 
twentieth  century  is  the  lineal  descendant 
of  mediaeval  Paris  and  Bologna.  They 
are  the  rock  whence  we  were  hewn,  the 
hole  of  the  pit  whence  we  were  digged. 
The  fundamental  organization  is  the 
same,  the  historic  continuity  is  unbroken. 
They  created  the  university  tradition  of 
the  modern  world,  that  common  tradition 
which  belongs  to  all  our  institutions  of 
higher  learning,  the  newest  as  well  as  the 

5 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


oldest,  and  which  all  college  and  univer¬ 
sity  men  should  know  and  cherish.  The 
origin  and  nature  of  these  earliest  uni¬ 
versities  is  the  subject  of  these  three  lec¬ 
tures.  The  first  will  deal  with  university 
institutions,  the  second  with  university  in¬ 
struction,  the  third  with  the  life  of  uni¬ 
versity  students. 

In  recent  years  the  early  history  of 
universities  has  begun  to  attract  the  se¬ 
rious  attention  of  historical  scholars,  and 
mediaeval  institutions  of  learning  have  at 
last  been  lifted  out  of  the  region  of  myth 
and  fable  where  they  long  lay  obscured. 
We  now  know  that  the  foundation  of  the 
University  of  Oxford  was  not  one  of  the 
many  virtues  which  the  millennial  cel¬ 
ebration  could  properly  ascribe  to  King 
Alfred;  that  Bologna  did  not  go  back  to 
the  Emperor  Theodosius;  that  the  Uni¬ 
versity  of  Paris  did  not  exist  in  the  time 
of  Charlemagne,  or  for  nearly  four  cen¬ 
turies  afterward.  It  is  hard,  even  for 
the  modern  world,  to  realize  that  many 

6 


THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 


things  had  no  founder  or  fixed  date  of 
beginning  but  instead  “  just  grew,”  aris¬ 
ing  slowly  and  silently  without  definite 
record.  This  explains  why,  in  spite  of  all 
the  researches  of  Father  Denifle  and 
Dean  Rashdall  and  the  local  antiquaries, 
the  beginnings  of  the  oldest  universities 
are  obscure  and  often  uncertain,  so  that 
we  must  content  ourselves  sometimes  with 
very  general  statements. 

The  occasion  for  the  rise  of  universities 
was  a  great  revival  of  learning,  not  that 
revival  of  the  fourteenth  and  fifteenth 
centuries  to  which  the  term  is  usually  ap¬ 
plied,  but  an  earlier  revival,  less  known 
though  in  its  way  quite  as  significant, 
which  historians  now  call  the  renaissance 
of  the  twelfth  century.  So  long  as  knowl¬ 
edge  was  limited  to  the  seven  liberal  arts 
of  the  early  Middle  Ages,  there  could  be 
no  universities,  for  there  was  nothing  to 
teach  beyond  the  bare  elements  of  gram¬ 
mar,  rhetoric,  logic,  and  the  still  barer  no¬ 
tions  of  arithmetic,  astronomy,  geometry, 
and  music,  which  did  duty  for  an  academic 

7 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

curriculum.  Between  1100  and  1200, 
however,  there  came  a  great  influx  of  new 
knowledge  into  western  Europe,  partly 
through  Italy  and  Sicily,  but  chiefly 
through  the  Arab  scholars  of  Spain  — 
the  works  of  Aristotle,  Euclid,  Ptolemy, 
and  the  Greek  physicians,  the  new  arith¬ 
metic,  and  those  texts  of  the  Roman  law 
which  had  lain  hidden  through  the  Dark 
Ages.  In  addition  to  the  elementary 
propositions  of  triangle  and  circle,  Europe 
now  had  those  books  of  plane  and  solid 
geometry  which  have  done  duty  in  schools 
and  colleges  ever  since;  instead  of  the 
painful  operations  with  Roman  numerals 
—  how  painful  one  can  readily  see  by 
trying  a  simple  problem  of  multiplica¬ 
tion  or  division  with  these  characters  — 

i 

it  was  now  possible  to  work  readily  with 
Arabic  figures;  in  the  place  of  Boethius 
the  “  Master  of  them  that  know  ”  became 
the  teacher  of  Europe  in  logic,  meta¬ 
physics,  and  ethics.  In  law  and  medicine 
men  now  possessed  the  fulness  of  ancient 
learning.  This  new  knowledge  burst  the 

8 


THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 


bonds  of  the  cathedral  and  monastery 
schools  and  created  the  learned  profes¬ 
sions;  it  drew  over  mountains  and  across 
the  narrow  seas  eager  youths  who,  like 
Chaucer’s  Oxford  clerk  of  a  later  day, 
‘  would  gladly  learn  and  gladly  teach/ 
to  form  in  Paris  and  Bologna  those  aca¬ 
demic  gilds  which  have  given  us  our  first 
and  our  best  definition  of  a  university,  a 
society  of  masters  and  scholars. 

To  this  general  statement  concerning 
the  twelfth  century  there  is  one  partial 
exception,  the  medical  university  of  Sa¬ 
lerno.  Here,  a  day’s  journey  to  the  south 
of  Naples,  in  territory  at  first  Lombard 
and  later  Norman,  but  still  in  close  con¬ 
tact  with  the  Greek  East,  a  school  of  med¬ 
icine  had  existed  as  early  as  the  middle 
of  the  eleventh  century,  and  for  perhaps 
two  hundred  years  thereafter  it  was  the 
most  renowned  medical  centre  in  Europe. 
In  this  “  city  of  Hippocrates  ”  the  med¬ 
ical  writings  of  the  ancient  Greeks  were 
expounded  and  even  developed  on  the 
side  of  anatomy  and  surgery,  while  its 

9 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

teachings  were  condensed  into  pithy  max¬ 
ims  of  hygiene  which  have  not  yet  lost 
their  vogue  —  “  after  dinner  walk  a 
mile,”  etc.  Of  the  academic  organization 
of  Salerno  we  know  nothing  before  1231, 
and  when  in  this  year  the  standardizing 
hand  of  Frederick  II  regulated  its  de¬ 
grees  Salerno  had  already  been  distanced 
by  newer  universities  farther  north.  Im¬ 
portant  in  the  history  of  medicine,  it  had 
no  influence  on  the  growth  of  university 
institutions. 

If  the  University  of  Salerno  is  older 
in  time,  that  of  Bologna  has  a  much  larger 
place  in  the  development  of  higher  educa¬ 
tion.  And  while  Salerno  was  known  only 
as  a  school  of  medicine,  Bologna  was  a 
many-sided  institution,  though  most  note¬ 
worthy  as  the  centre  of  the  revival  of  the 
Roman  law.  Contrary  to  a  common  im¬ 
pression,  the  Roman  law  did  not  disap¬ 
pear  from  the  West  in  the  early  Middle 
Ages,  but  its  influence  was  greatly  dimin¬ 
ished  as  a  result  of  the  Germanic  inva¬ 
sions.  Side  by  side  with  the  Germanic 

10 


THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 

codes,  Homan  law  survived  as  the  cus¬ 
tomary  law  of  the  Roman  population, 
known  no  longer  through  the  great  law 
books  of  Justinian  but  in  elementary 
manuals  and  form-books  which  grew 
thinner  and  more  jejune  as  time  went  on. 
The  Digest ,  the  most  important  part  of 
the  Corpus  Juris  Civilis,  disappears  from 
view  between  603  and  1076;  only  two 
manuscripts  survived;  in  Maitland’s 
phrase,  it  “  barely  escaped  with  its  life.” 
Legal  study  persisted,  if  at  all,  merely  as 
an  apprenticeship  in  the  drafting  of  doc¬ 
uments,  a  form  of  applied  rhetoric. 
Then,  late  in  the  eleventh  century,  and 
closely  connected  with  the  revival  of  trade 
and  town  life,  came  a  revival  of  law,  fore¬ 
shadowing  the  renaissance  of  the  century 
which  followed.  This  revival  can  be 
traced  at  more  than  one  point  in  Italy, 
perhaps  not  first  at  Bologna,  but  here  it 
soon  found  its  centre  for  the  geograph¬ 
ical  reasons  which,  then  as  now,  made  this 
city  the  meeting-point  of  the  chief  routes 
of  communication  in  northern  Italy. 

11 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

Some  time  before  1100  we  hear  of  a  pro¬ 
fessor  named  Pepo,  4 4  the  bright  and  shin¬ 
ing  light  of  Bologna  by  1119  we  meet 
with  the  phrase  Bononia  docta.  At  Bo¬ 
logna,  as  at  Paris,  a  great  teacher  stands 
at  the  beginning  of  university  develop¬ 
ment.  The  teacher  who  gave  Bologna  its 
reputation  was  one  Irnerius,  perhaps  the 
most  famous  of  the  many  great  professors 
of  law  in  the  Middle  Ages.  Just  what  he 
wrote  and  what  he  taught  are  still  subjects 
of  dispute  among  scholars,  but  he  seems  to 
have  fixed  the  method  of  4  glossing  ’  the 
law  texts  upon  the  basis  of  a  comprehen¬ 
sive  use  of  the  whole  Corpus  Juris ,  as 
contrasted  with  the  meagre  epitomes  of 
the  preceding  centuries,  fully  and  finally 
separating  the  Roman  law  from  rhetoric 
and  establishing  it  firmly  as  a  subject  of 
professional  study.  Then,  about  1140, 
Gratian,  a  monk  of  San  Felice,  com¬ 
posed  the  Decretum  which  became 
the  standard  text  in  canon  law,  thus 
marked  off  from  theology  as  a  distinct 
subject  of  higher  study;  and  the  preemi- 

12 


THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 


nence  of  Bologna  as  a  law  school  was 
fully  assured. 

A  student  class  had  now  appeared,  ex¬ 
pressing  itself  in  correspondence  and  in 
poetry,  and  by  1158  it  was  sufficiently 
important  in  Italy  to  receive  a  formal 
grant  of  rights  and  privileges  from  Em¬ 
peror  Frederick  Barbarossa,  though  no 
particular  town  or  university  is  men¬ 
tioned.  By  this  time  Bologna  had  be¬ 
come  the  resort  of  some  hundreds  of  stu¬ 
dents,  not  only  from  Italy  but  from 
beyond  the  Alps.  Far  from  home  and 
undefended,  they  united  for  mutual  pro¬ 
tection  and  assistance,  and  this  organiza¬ 
tion  of  foreign,  or  Transmontane,  stu¬ 
dents  was  the  beginning  of  the  university. 

In  this  union  they  seem  to  have  followed 
the  example  of  the  gilds  already  common 
in  Italian  cities.  Indeed,  the  word  uni¬ 
versity  means  originally  such  a  group  or  1/ 
corporation  in  general,  and  only  in 
time  did  it  come  to  be  limited  to  gilds 
of  masters  and  students,  universitas 
societas  magistrorum  discipulorumque. 

13 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


Historically,  the  word  university  has  no 
connection  with  the  universe  or  the  uni¬ 
versality  of  learning;  it  denotes  only  the 
totality  of  a  group,  whether  of  bar¬ 
bers,  carpenters,  or  students  did  not 
matter.  The  students  of  Bologna  organ¬ 
ized  such  a  university  first  as  a  means  of 
protection  against  the  townspeople,  for 
the  price  of  rooms  and  necessaries  rose 
rapidly  with  the  crowd  of  new  tenants 
and  consumers,  and  the  individual  stu¬ 
dent  was  helpless  against  such  profiteer¬ 
ing.  United,  the  students  could  bring 
the  town  to  terms  by  the  threat  of 
departure  as  a  body,  secession,  for  the 
university,  having  no  buildings,  was  free 
to  move,  and  there  are  many  historic  ex¬ 
amples  of  such  migrations.  Better  rent 
one’s  rooms  for  less  than  not  rent  them  at 
all,  and  so  the  student  organizations 
secured  the  power  to  fix  the  prices  of 
lodgings  and  books  through  their  repre¬ 
sentatives. 

Victorious  over  the  townsmen,  the  stu¬ 
dents  turned  on  ‘  their  other  enemies,  the 

14 


THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 

professors.’  Here  the  threat  was  a  col¬ 
lective  boycott,  and  as  the  masters  lived 
at  first  wholly  from  the  fees  of  their  pu¬ 
pils,  this  threat  was  equally  effective.  The 
professor  was  put  under  bond  to  live  up 
to  a  minute  set  of  regulations  which  guar¬ 
anteed  his  students  the  worth  of  the 
money  paid  by  each.  We  read  in  the 
earliest  statutes  (1317)  that  a  professor 
might  not  be  absent  without  leave,  even  a 
single  day,  and  if  he  desired  to  leave  town 
he  had  to  make  a  deposit  to  ensure  his 
return.  If  he  failed  to  secure  an  audi¬ 
ence  of  five  for  a  regular  lecture,  he  was 
fined  as  if  absent  —  a  poor  lecture  indeed 
which  could  not  secure  five  hearers!  He 
must  begin  with  the  bell  and  quit  within 
one  minute  after  the  next  bell.  He  was 
not  allowed  to  skip  a  chapter  in  his  com¬ 
mentary,  or  postpone  a  difficulty  to  the 
end  of  the  hour,  and  he  was  obliged  to 
cover  ground  systematically,  so  much  in 
each  specific  term  of  the  year.  No  one 
might  spend  the  whole  year  on  introduc¬ 
tion  and  bibliography !  Coercion  of  this 

15 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


sort  presupposes  an  effective  organization 
of  the  student  body,  and  we  hear  of  two 
and  even  four  universities  of  students, 
each  composed  of  4  nations  ’  and  presided 
over  by  a  rector.  Emphatically  Bologna 
was  a  student  university,  and  Italian  stu¬ 
dents  are  still  quite  apt  to  demand  a  voice 
in  university  affairs.  When  I  first  vis¬ 
ited  the  University  of  Palermo  I  found  it 
just  recovering  from  a  riot  in  which  the 
students  had  broken  the  front  windows 
in  a  demand  for  more  frequent,  and  thus 
less  comprehensive,  examinations.  At 
Padua’s  seventh  centenary  last  May  the 
students  practically  took  over  the  town, 
with  a  programme  of  processions  and  cer¬ 
emonies  quite  their  own  and  an  amount 
of  noise  and  tumult  which  almost  broke 
up  the  most  solemn  occasions  and  did 
break  the  windows  of  the  greatest  hall  in 
the  city. 

Excluded  from  the  4  universities  ’  of 
students,  the  professors  also  formed  a  gild 
or  4  college,’  requiring  for  admission  there¬ 
to  certain  qualifications  which  were  ascer- 

16 


THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 


tained  by  examination,  so  that  no  student 
could  enter  save  by  the  gild’s  consent. 
And,  inasmuch  as  ability  to  teach  a  sub¬ 
ject  is  a  good  test  of  knowing  it,  the 
student  came  to  seek  the  professor’s  license 
as  a  certificate  of  attainment,  regardless 
of  his  future  career.  This  certificate,  the 
license  to  teach  ( licentia  docendi ),  thus 
became  the  earliest  form  of  academic 
degree.  Our  higher  degrees  still  pre¬ 
serve  this  tradition  in  the  words  master 
( magister )  and  doctor,  originally  synony¬ 
mous,  while  the  French  even  have  a 
licence .  A  Master  of  Arts  was  one  quali¬ 
fied  to  teach  the  liberal  arts;  a  Doctor  of 
Laws,  a  certified  teacher  of  law.  And  the 
ambitious  student  sought  the  degree  and 
gave  an  inaugural  lecture,  even  when  he 
expressly  disclaimed  all  intention  of  con¬ 
tinuing  in  the  teaching  profession. 
Already  we  recognize  at  Bologna  the 
standard  academic  degrees  as  well  as  the 
university  organization  and  well-known 
officials  like  the  rector. 

Other  subjects  of  study  appeared  in 

17 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

course  of  time,  arts,  medicine,  and  theol¬ 
ogy,  but  Bologna  was  preeminently  a 
school  of  civil  law,  and  as  such  it  became 
the  model  of  university  organization  for 
Italy,  Spain,  and  southern  France,  coun¬ 
tries  where  the  study  of  law  has  always 
had  political  and  social  as  well  as  merely 
academic  significance.  Some  of  these  uni¬ 
versities  became  Bologna’s  competitors, 
like  Montpellier  and  Orleans  as  well  as 
the  Italian  schools  nearer  home.  Fred¬ 
erick  II  founded  the  University  of 
Naples  in  1224  so  that  the  students  of  his 
Sicilian  kingdom  could  go  to  a  Ghibelline 
school  at  home  instead  of  the  Guelfic  cen¬ 
tre  in  the  North.  Rival  Padua  was 
founded  two  years  earlier  as  a  secession 
from  Bologna,  and  only  last  year,  on  the 
occasion  of  Padua’s  seven-hundredth  an¬ 
niversary,  I  saw  the  ancient  feud  healed 
by  the  kiss  of  peace  bestowed  on  Bologna’s 
rector  amid  the  encores  of  ten  thou¬ 
sand  spectators.  Padua,  however,  scarcely 
equalled  Bologna  in  our  period,  even 
though  at  a  later  age  Portia  sent  thither 

18 


THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 


for  legal  authority,  and  though  the  uni¬ 
versity  still  shines  with  the  glory  of 
Galileo. 

In  northern  Europe  the  origin  of  uni¬ 
versities  must  be  sought  at  Paris,  in  the 
cathedral  school  of  Notre-Dame.  By  the 
beginning  of  the  twelfth  century  in 
France  and  the  Low  Countries  learning 
was  no  longer  confined  to  monasteries  but 
had  its  most  active  centres  in  the  schools 
attached  to  cathedrals,  of  which  the  most 
famous  were  those  of  Liege,  Rheims, 
Laon,  Paris,  Orleans,  and  Chartres.  The 
most  notable  of  these  schools  of  the  liberal 
arts  was  probably  Chartres,  distinguished 
by  a  canonist  like  St.  Ives  and  by  famous 
teachers  of  classics  and  philosophy  like 
Bernard  and  Thierry.  As  early  as  991 
a  monk  of  Rheims,  Richer,  describes  the 
hardships  of  his  journey  to  Chartres  in 
order  to  study  the  Aphorisms  of  Hippoc¬ 
rates  of  Cos;  while  from  the  twelfth  cen¬ 
tury  John  of  Salisbury,  the  leading  north¬ 
ern  humanist  of  the  age,  has  left  us  an 

19 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

account  of  the  masters  which  we  shall 
later  have  occasion  to  cite.  Nowhere  else 
today  can  we  drop  back  more  easily  into  a 
cathedral  city  of  the  twelfth  century,  the 
peaceful  town  still  dominated  by  its 
church  and  sharing,  now  as  then, 

the  minster’s  vast  repose. 
Silent  and  gray  as  forest-leaguered  cliff 
Left  inland  by  the  ocean’s  slow  retreat, 

. patiently  remote 

From  the  great  tides  of  life  it  breasted  once, 
Hearing  the  noise  of  men  as  in  a  dream. 

By  the  time  the  cathedral  stood  complete, 
with  its  “  dedicated  shapes  of  saints  and 
kings,”  it  had  ceased  to  be  an  intellectual 
centre  of  the  first  importance,  over¬ 
shadowed  by  Paris  fifty-odd  miles  away, 
so  that  Chartres  never  became  a  uni¬ 
versity. 

The  advantages  of  Paris  were  partly 
geographical,  partly  political  as  the  cap¬ 
ital  of  the  new  French  monarchy,  but 
something  must  be  set  down  to  the  influ¬ 
ence  of  a  great  teacher  in  the  person  of 
Abelard.  This  brilliant  young  radical, 

20 


THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 


with  his  persistent  questioning  and  his 
scant  respect  for  titled  authority,  drew 
students  in  large  numbers  wherever  he 
taught,  whether  at  Paris  or  in  the  wilder¬ 
ness.  At  Paris  he  was  connected  with  the 
church  of  Mont-Sainte-Genevieve  longer 
than  with  the  cathedral  school,  but  resort 
to  Paris  became  a  habit  in  his  time,  and 
in  this  way  he  had  a  significant  influence 
on  the  rise  of  the  university.  In  an  institu¬ 
tional  sense  the  university  was  a  direct 
outgrowth  of  the  school  of  Notre-Dame, 
whose  chancellor  alone  had  authority  to 
license  teaching  in  the  diocese  and  thus 
kept  his  control  over  the  granting  of  uni¬ 
versity  degrees,  which  here  as  at  Bologna 
were  originally  teachers’  certificates.  The 
early  schools  were  within  the  cathedral 
precincts  on  the  lie  de  la  Cite,  that  tan¬ 
gled  quarter  about  Notre-Dame  pictured 
by  Victor  Hugo  which  has  long  since 
been  demolished.  A  little  later  we  find 
masters  and  scholars  living  on  the  Little 
Bridge  (Petit-Pont)  which  connected  the 
island  with  the  Left  Bank  of  the  Seine  — 


21 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


this  bridge  gave  its  name  to  a  whole  school 
of  philosophers,  the  Parvipontani  —  but 
by  the  thirteenth  century  they  have  over¬ 
run  the  Left  Bank,  thenceforth  the  Latin 
Quarter  of  Paris. 

At  what  date  Paris  ceased  to  be  a  ca¬ 
thedral  school  and  became  a  university, 
no  one  can  say,  though  it  was  certainly  be¬ 
fore  the  end  of  the  twelfth  century.  Uni¬ 
versities,  however,  like  to  have  precise 
dates  to  celebrate,  and  the  University  of 
Paris  has  chosen  1200,  the  year  of  its  first 
royal  charter.  In  that  year,  after  certain 
students  had  been  killed  in  a  town  and 
gown  altercation,  King  Philip  Augustus 
issued  a  formal  privilege  which  punished 
his  prevot  and  recognized  the  exemption 
of  the  students  and  their  servants  from 
lay  jurisdiction,  thus  creating  that  special 
position  of  students  before  the  courts 
which  has  not  yet  wholly  disappeared 
from  the  world’s  practice,  though  gener¬ 
ally  from  its  law.  More  specific  was  the 
first  papal  privilege,  the  bull  Parens  sci- 
entiarum  of  1231,  issued  after  a  two 


22 


THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 


i 


years’  cessation  of  lectures  growing  out 
of  a  riot  in  which  a  band  of  students,  hav¬ 
ing  found  “  wine  that  was  good  and  sweet 
to  drink,”  beat  up  the  tavern  keeper  and 
his  friends  till  they  in  turn  suffered  from 
the  prevot  and  his  men,  a  dissension  in 
which  the  thirteenth  century  clearly  saw 
the  hand  of  the  devil.  Confirming  the 
existing  exemptions,  the  Pope  goes  on  to 
regulate  the  discretion  of  the  chancellor 
in  conferring  the  license,  at  the  same  time 
that  he  recognizes  the  right  of  the  masters 
and  students  “  to  make  constitutions  and 
ordinances  regulating  the  manner  and 
time  of  lectures  and  disputations,  the 
costume  to  be  worn,”  attendance  at  mas¬ 
ters’  funerals,  the  lectures  of  bachelors, 
necessarily  more  limited  than  those  of 
fully  fledged  masters,  the  price  of  lodg¬ 
ings,  and  the  coercion  of  members.  Stu¬ 
dents  must  not  carry  arms,  and  only  those 
who  frequent  the  schools  regularly  are  to 
enjoy  the  exemptions  of  students,  the 
interpretation  in  practice  being  attend¬ 
ance  at  not  less  than  two  lectures  a  week. 


23 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

While  the  word  university  does  not  ap¬ 
pear  in  these  documents,  it  is  taken  for 
granted.  A  university  in  the  sense  of  an 
organized  body  of  masters  existed  already 
in  the  twelfth  century;  by  1231  it  had  de¬ 
veloped  into  a  corporation,  for  Paris,  in 
contrast  to  Bologna,  was  a  university  of 
masters.  There  were  now  four  faculties, 
each  under  a  dean:  arts,  canon  law  (civil 
law  was  forbidden  at  Paris  after  1219), 
medicine,  and  theology.  The  masters  of 
arts,  much  more  numerous  than  the 
others,  were  grouped  into  four  ‘  na¬ 
tions  ’ :  the  French,  including  the  Latin 
peoples;  the  Norman;  the  Picard,  in¬ 
cluding  also  the  Low  Countries;  and  the 
English,  comprising  England,  Germany, 
and  the  North  and  East  of  Europe. 
These  four  nations  chose  the  head  of  the 
university,  the  rector,  as  he  is  still  gener¬ 
ally  styled  on  the  Continent,  whose  term, 
however,  was  short,  being  later  only  three 
months.  If  we  may  judge  from  such 
minutes  as  have  survived,  much  of  the 
time  of  the  nations  was  devoted  to  con- 


24 


THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 


suming  the  fees  collected  from  new  mem¬ 
bers  and  new  officers,  or,  as  it  was  called, 
drinking  up  the  surplus  —  at  the  Two 
Swords  near  the  Petit-Pont,  at  the  sign 
of  Our  Lady  in  the  Rue  S.- Jacques,  at 
the  Swan,  the  Falcon,  the  Arms  of 
France,  and  scores  of  similar  places.  A 
learned  monograph  on  the  taverns  of  me¬ 
diaeval  Paris  has  been  written  from  the 
records  of  the  English  nation  alone.  The 
artificial  constitution  of  the  nations  seems 
to  have  encouraged  rather  than  dimin¬ 
ished  the  feuds  and  rivalries  between  the 
various  regions  represented  at  Paris,  of 
which  Jacques  de  Vitry  has  left  a  classic 
description : 1 

“  They  wrangled  and  disputed  not 
merely  about  the  various  sects  or  about 
some  discussions;  but  the  differences  be¬ 
tween  the  countries  also  caused  dissen¬ 
sions,  hatreds,  and  virulent  animosities 
among  them,  and  they  impudently  ut¬ 
tered  all  kinds  of  affronts  and  insults 

1  As  translated  by  Munro,  The  Mediaeval 
Student ,  p.  19. 


25 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

against  one  another.  They  affirmed  that 
the  English  were  drunkards  and  had  tails ; 
the  sons  of  France  proud,  effeminate,  and 
carefully  adorned  like  women.  They 
said  that  the  Germans  were  furious  and 
obscene  at  their  feasts ;  the  N ormans,  vain 
and  boastful;  the  Poitevins,  traitors  and 
always  adventurers.  The  Burgundians 
they  considered  vulgar  and  stupid.  The 
Bretons  were  reputed  to  be  fickle  and 
changeable,  and  were  often  reproached 
for  the  death  of  Arthur.  The  Lombards 
were  called  avaricious,  vicious,  and  cow¬ 
ardly;  the  Romans,  seditious,  turbulent, 
and  slanderous;  the  Sicilians,  tyrannical 
and  cruel;  the  inhabitants  of  Brabant, 
men  of  blood,  incendiaries,  brigands,  and 

_  A 

ravishers;  the  Flemish,  fickle,  prodi¬ 
gal,  gluttonous,  yielding  as  butter,  and 
slothful.  After  such  insults,  from  words 
they  often  came  to  blows.” 

Another  university  institution  which 
goes  back  to  twelfth-century  Paris  is  the 
college.  Originally  merely  an  endowed 
hospice  or  hall  of  residence,  the  college 

26 


THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 

early  became  an  established  unit  of  aca¬ 
demic  life  at  many  universities.  “  The 
object  of  the  earliest  college-founders  was 
simply  to  secure  board  and  lodging  for 
poor  scholars  who  could  not  pay  for  it 
themselves”;  but  in  course  of  time  the 
colleges  became  normal  centres  of  life  and 
teaching,  absorbing  into  themselves  much 
of  the  activity  of  the  university.  The  col¬ 
leges  had  buildings  and  endowments,  if 
the  university  had  not.  There  was  a  col¬ 
lege  at  Paris  as  early  as  1180;  there  were 
sixty-eight  by  1500,  and  the  system  sur¬ 
vived  until  the  Revolution,  to  leave  be¬ 
hind  it  only  fragments  of  buildings  or 
local  names  like  the  Sorbonne  of  today, 
sole  memento  of  that  College  de  la  Sor¬ 
bonne  founded  for  theologians  by  a  con¬ 
fessor  of  St.  Louis  in  the  thirteenth  cen¬ 
tury.  Many  other  continental  universi¬ 
ties  had  their  colleges,  one  of  which,  the 
ancient  College  of  Spain  at  Bologna,  still 
survives  for  the  delectation  of  the  few 
Spanish  youths  who  reach  its  quiet  court¬ 
yard.  But  of  course  the  ultimate  home  of 

27 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


the  college  was  Oxford  and  Cambridge, 
where  it  came  to  be  the  most  character¬ 
istic  feature  of  university  life,  arrogating 
to  itself  practically  all  teaching  as  well  as 
direction  of  social  life,  until  the  univer¬ 
sity  became  merely  an  examining  and  de¬ 
gree-conferring  body.  Here  the  older 
colleges  like  Balliol,  Merton,  and  Peter- 
house  date  from  the  thirteenth  century. 

Paris  was  preeminent  in  the  Middle 
Ages  as  a  school  of  theology,  and,  as  the¬ 
ology  was  the  supreme  subject  of  me¬ 
diaeval  study,  “  Madame  la  haute  sci¬ 
ence  ”  it  was  called,  this  means  that  it  was 
preeminent  as  a  university.  “  The  Ital¬ 
ians  have  the  Papacy,  the  Germans  have 
the  Empire,  and  the  French  have  Learn¬ 
ing, ”  ran  the  old  saying;  and  the  chosen 
abode  of  learning  was  Paris.  Quite  natu¬ 
rally  Paris  became  the  source  and  the 
model  for  northern  universities.  Oxford 
branched  off  from  this  parent  stem  late 
in  the  twelfth  century,  likewise  with  no 
definite  date  of  foundation;  Cambridge 
began  somewhat  later.  The  German  uni- 

28 


THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 


versities,  none  of  them  older  than  the 
fourteenth  century,  were  confessed  imi¬ 
tations  of  Paris.  Thus  the  Elector  Pala¬ 
tine,  "Ruprecht,  in  founding  the  Univer¬ 
sity  of  Heidelberg  in  1386  —  for  these 
later  universities  were  founded  at  specific 
dates  —  provides  that  it  “  shall  be  ruled, 
disposed,  and  regulated  according  to  the 
modes  and  matters  accustomed  to  be  ob¬ 
served  in  the  University  of  Paris,  and 
that  as  a  handmaid  of  Paris  —  a  worthy 
one  let  us  hope  —  it  shall  imitate  the  steps 
of  Paris  in  every  way  possible,  so  that 
there  shall  be  four  faculties,”  four  na¬ 
tions  and  a  rector,  exemptions  for  stu¬ 
dents  and  their  servants,  and  even  caps 
and  gowns  for  the  several  faculties  “  as 
has  been  observed  at  Paris.5’ 1 

By  the  end  of  the  Middle  Ages  at  least 
eighty  universities  had  been  founded  in  v 
different  parts  of  Europe.2  Some  of 

1  Translated  in  E.  F.  Henderson,  Select  Histor¬ 
ical  Documents  of  the  Middle  Ages ,  pp.  262-266. 

2  Table  in  Rashdall,  Universities ,  I,  p.  xxviii; 
map  at  beginning  of  Vol.  II  and  in  Shepherd,  His¬ 
torical  Atlas  (New  York,  1911),  p.  100. 

29 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

these  were  short-lived,  many  were  of  only 
local  importance,  others  like  Salerno 
flourished  only  to  die,  but  some  like  Paris 
and  Montpellier,  Bologna  and  Padua, 
Oxford  and  Cambridge,  Vienna  and 
Prague  and  Leipzig,  Coimbra  and  Sa¬ 
lamanca,  Cracow  and  Louvain,  have  an 
unbroken  history  of  many  centuries  of 
distinction.  And  the  great  European  uni¬ 
versities  of  more  recent  foundation,  like 
Berlin,  Strasbourg,  Edinburgh,  Man¬ 
chester,  and  London,  follow  in  their  or¬ 
ganization  the  ancient  models.  In  Amer¬ 
ica  the  earliest  institutions  of  higher  learn¬ 
ing  reproduced  the  type  of  the  contempo¬ 
rary  English  college  at  a  time  when  the 
university  in  England  was  eclipsed  by 
its  constituent  colleges;  but  in  the  crea¬ 
tion  of  universities  in  the  later  nineteenth 
century,  America  turned  to  the  univer¬ 
sities  of  the  Continent  and  thus  entered 
once  more  into  the  ancient  inheritance. 
Even  in  the  colonial  period  a  sense  of  the 
general  university  tradition  survived,  for 
the  charter  of  Rhode  Island  College  in 

30 


THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 


17 64  grants  “the  same  privileges,  dig¬ 
nities,  and  immunities  enjoyed  by  the 
American  colleges,  and  European  uni¬ 
versities.’ ’ 

What  then  is  our  inheritance  from  the 
oldest  of  universities?  In  the  first  place 
it  is  not  buildings  or  a  type  of  architec¬ 
ture,  for  the  early  universities  had  no 
buildings  of  their  own,  but  on  occasion 
used  private  halls  and  neighboring 
churches.  After  all,  as  late  as  1775  the 
First  Baptist  Church  in  Providence  was 
built  “  for  the  publick  worship  of  Al¬ 
mighty  God,  and  also  for  holding  Com¬ 
mencement  in  ”  !  Indeed  one  who  seeks 
to  reconstruct  the  life  of  ancient  univer¬ 
sities  will  find  little  aid  in  their  existing 
remains.  Salerno  retains  no  monuments 
of  its  university,  though  its  rare  old  cathe¬ 
dral,  where  Hildebrand  lies  buried,  must 
have  seen  the  passing  of  many  genera¬ 
tions  of  would-be  physicians.  In  the  halls 
and  coats  of  arms  of  “  many-domed 
Padua  proud  ”  we  behold  the  Renais- 

31 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

sance,  not  the  Middle  Ages.  Even  Bo¬ 
logna,  Bononia  docta,  with  its  leaning 
towers  and  cool  arcades,  has  no  remains 
of  university  architecture  earlier  than  the 
fourteenth  century,  from  which  date  the 
oldest  monuments  of  its  professors  of  law 
gathered  now  into  the  municipal  museum. 
Montpellier  and  Orleans  preserve  noth¬ 
ing  from  this  period.  Paris,  too  often 
careless  of  its  storied  past,  can  show  to¬ 
day  only  the  ancient  church  of  Saint- 
Julien-le-Pauvre,  where  university  meet¬ 
ings  were  often  held,  unless  we  count,  as 
we  should,  the  great  cathedral  in  the  Cite 
whence  the  university  originally  sprang. 
The  oldest  Cambridge  college,  Peter- 
house,  has  only  a  fragment  of  its  earliest 
buildings;  the  finest  Cambridge  monu¬ 
ment,  King’s  College  chapel,  is  of  the  late 
fifteenth  century.  More  than  all  others 
Oxford  gives  the  deepest  impression  of 
continuity  with  an  ancient  past,  Matthew 
Arnold’s  Oxford,  “  so  venerable,  so 
lovely  .  .  .  steeped  in  sentiment  as  she 
lies,  spreading  her  gardens  to  the  moon- 

32 


THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 

light,  and  whispering  from  her  towers  the 
last  enchantments  of  the  Middle  Age  ”  ; 
yet  so  far  as  the  actual  college  buildings 
are  concerned  they  have  much  more  of 
sentiment  than  of  the  Middle  Ages.  Only 
at  Merton,  which  fixed  the  college  type 
at  Oxford,  do  any  of  the  present  struc¬ 
tures  carry  us  back  of  1300,  and  nowhere 
is  there  much  of  the  fourteenth  century. 
Those  venerable  glories  of  Oxford,  the 
Bodleian  library,  the  tower  of  Magdalen, 
and  the  hall  of  Christ  Church,  belong  to 
a  much  later  age,  the  period  of  the  Tu¬ 
dors,  and  thus  by  ordinary  reckoning  to 
modern  times.  When  we  say  how  very 
mediaeval,  we  often  mean  how  very 
Tudor! 

Neither  does  the  continuity  lie  in  aca¬ 
demic  form  and  ceremony,  in  spite  of  oc¬ 
casional  survivals,  like  the  conferring  of 
degrees  by  the  ring  or  the  kiss  of  peace, 
or  the  timing  of  examinations  by  the  hour 
glass  as  I  have  seen  it  at  Portuguese 
Coimbra.  Academic  costume  has  in  it 
some  element  of  tradition  where  it  is  a 

33 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


daily  dress  as  at  Oxford,  Cambridge,  and 
Coimbra,  but  in  America  the  tradition 
was  broken  by  our  ancestors,  and  the 
formal  cap  and  gown  current  in  the 
United  States  today  are  a  product  of 
modern  Albany  rather  than  of  mediaeval 
Paris  and  Bologna.  Even  in  their  ancient 
homes  the  costumes  have  changed.  “  It 
is  probable,”  says  Rashdall,  “  that  no 
gown  now  worn  in  Oxford  has  much  re¬ 
semblance  to  its  mediaeval  ancestor.”  A 
student  of  mediaeval  Padua  would  not 
recognize  the  variegated  procession  which 
wound  through  its  streets  last  summer; 
Robert  de  Sorbon  would  rub  his  eyes  at 
the  non-mediaeval  styles  of  the  gorgeous 
gowns  which  were  massed  on  the  stage  of 
the  great  hall  of  the  Sorbonne  when  Pres¬ 
ident  Wilson  received  his  honorary  degree 
in  1918. 

It  is,  then,  in  institutions  that  the  uni¬ 
versity  tradition  is  most  direct.  First,  the 
very  name  university,  as  an  association  of 
masters  and  scholars  leading  the  common 
life  of  learning.  Characteristic  of  the 

34 


THE  EARLIEST  UNIVERSITIES 

Middle  Ages  as  such  a  corporation  is, 
the  individualistic  modern  world  has 
found  nothing  to  take  its  place.  Next, 
the  notion  of  a  curriculum  of  study,  defi¬ 
nitely  laid  down  as  regards  time  and  sub¬ 
jects,  tested  by  an  examination  and  lead¬ 
ing  to  a  degree,  as  well  as  many  of  the 
degrees  themselves  —  bachelor,  as  a  stage 
toward  the  mastership,  master,  doctor,  in 
arts,  law,  medicine,  and  theology.  Then 
the  faculties,  four  or  more,  with  their 
deans,  and  the  higher  officers  such  as  chan¬ 
cellors  and  rectors,  not  to  mention  the 
college,  wherever  the  residential  college 
still  survives.  The  essentials  of  university 
organization  are  clear  and  unmistakable, 
and  they  have  been  handed  down  in  un¬ 
broken  continuity.  They  have  lasted 
more  than  seven  hundred  years  —  what 
form  of  government'  has  lasted  so  long? 
Very  likely  all  this  is  not  final  —  nothing 
is  in  this  world  of  flux  —  but  it  is  singu¬ 
larly  tough  and  persistent,  suited  to  use 
and  also  to  abuse,  like  Bryce’s  university 
with  a  faculty  “  consisting  of  Mrs.  John- 

35 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

son  and  myself,”  or  the  “  eleven  leading 
universities  ”  of  a  certain  state  of  the 
Middle  West!  Universities  are  at  times 
criticised  for  their  aloofness  or  their  de¬ 
votion  to  vocationalism,  for  being  too 
easy  or  too  severe,  and  drastic  efforts  have 
been  made  to  reform  them  by  abolishing 
entrance  requirements  or  eliminating  all 
that  does  not  lead  directly  to  bread  and 
butter;  but  no  substitute  has  been  found 
for  the  university  in  its  main  business, 
the  training  of  scholars  and  the  mainte¬ 
nance  of  the  tradition  of  learning  and  in¬ 
vestigation.  The  glory  of  the  mediaeval 
university,  says  Rashdall,  was  “  the  con- 
j  secration  of  Learning,”  and  the  glory  and 
the  vision  have  not  yet  perished  from  the 
earth.  “  The  mediaeval  university,”  it 
has  been  said,  “  was  the  school  of  the  mod¬ 
em  spirit.”  How  the  early  universities 
performed  this  task  will  be  the  theme  of 
the  next  lecture. 


36 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 


II 

) 

THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 

In  the  last  lecture  we  considered  the 
mediaeval  university  as  an  institution. 
We  come  now  to  examine  it  as  an  intel¬ 
lectual  centre.  This  involves  some  ac¬ 
count  of  its  course  of  study,  its  methods 
of  teaching,  and  the  status  and  freedom 
of  its  teachers.  The  element  of  continu¬ 
ity,  so  clear  in  institutions,  is  often  less 
evident  in  the  content  of  learning,  but 
even  here  the  thread  is  unbroken,  the  con¬ 
trast  with  modern  conditions  less  sharp 
than  is  often  supposed. 

The  basis  of  education  in  the  early 
Middle  Ages  consisted,  as  we  have  seen,  of 
the  so-called  seven  liberal  arts.  Three  of 
these,  grammar,  rhetoric,  and  logic,  were 
grouped  as  the  trivium;  the  remaining 
four,  arithmetic,  geometry,  astronomy, 
and  music,  made  up  the  quadrivium.  The 

37 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

first  group  was  the  more  rudimentary, 
but  the  second  was  rudimentary  enough. 
The  number  was  fixed  and  the  content 
standardized  during  the  decadence  of  an¬ 
cient  learning,  and  the  whole  conception 
reached  the  Middle  Ages  chiefly  in  the 
book  of  a  certain  Martianus  Capella, 
written  in  the  early  fifth  century.  These 
later  ages  of  classical  antiquity,  in  con¬ 
densing  and  desiccating  knowledge  for 
their  own  more  limited  intelligence,  were 
also  unconsciously  preparing  for  later 
times  those  small  and  convenient  pack¬ 
ages  which  alone  could  be  carried  as  a 
viaticum  through  the  stormy  times  of  the 
Dark  Ages.  It  was  almost  wholly  as 
formulated  in  a  few  standard  texts  that 
the  learning  of  the  ancient  world  was 
transmitted  to  mediaeval  times,  and  the 
authority  of  these  manuals  was  so  great 
that  a  list  of  those  in  use  in  any  period  af¬ 
fords  an  accurate  index  of  the  extent  of 
its  knowledge  and  the  nature  of  its  in¬ 
struction.  It  was  a  bookish  age,  with 
great  reverence  for  standard  authorities, 

38 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 


and  its  instruction  followed  closely  the 
written  word. 

In  the  monastic  and  cathedral  schools  of 
the  earlier  period  the  text-books  were  few 
and  simple,  chiefly  the  Latin  grammars 
of  Donatus  and  Priscian  with  some  ele¬ 
mentary  reading-books,  the  logical  man¬ 
uals  of  Boethius,  as  well  as  his  arithmetic 
and  music,  a  manual  of  rhetoric,  the  most 
elementary  propositions  of  geometry,  and 
an  outline  of  practical  astronomy  such  as 
that  of  the  Venerable  Bede.  Of  Greek, 
of  course,  there  was  none.  This  slender 
curriculum  in  arts  was  much  enlarged  by 
the  renaissance  of  the  twelfth  century, 
which  added  to  the  store  of  western 
knowledge  the  astronomy  of  Ptolemy, 
the  complete  works  of  Euclid,  and  the 
Aristotelian  logic,  while  at  the  same  time 
under  the  head  of  grammar  great  stimu¬ 
lus  was  given  to  the  study  and  reading  of 
the  Latin  classics.  This  classical  revival, 
which  is  noteworthy  and  comparatively 
little  known,  centred  in  such  cathedral 
schools  as  Chartres  and  Orleans,  where 

39 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


the  spirit  of  a  real  humanism  showed  it¬ 
self  in  an  enthusiastic  study  of  ancient 
authors  and  in  the  production  of  Latin 
verse  of  a  really  remarkable  quality.  Cer¬ 
tain  writings  of  one  of  these  poets,  Bishop 
Hildebert  of  Le  Mans,  were  even  mis¬ 
taken  for  “  real  antiques  ”  by  later  hu¬ 
manists.  Nevertheless,  though  brilliant, 
this  classical  movement  was  short-lived, 
crushed  in  its  early  youth  by  the  triumph 
of  logic  and  the  more  practical  studies  of 
law  and  rhetoric.  In  the  later  twelfth 
century  John  of  Salisbury  inveighs 
against  the  logicians  of  his  day,  with  their 
superficial  knowledge  of  literature ;  in  the 
university  curriculum  of  the  thirteenth 
century,  literary  studies  have  quite  dis¬ 
appeared.  Toward  1250,  when  a  French 
poet,  Henri  d’Andeli,  wrote  his  Battle  of 
the  Seven  Arts ,  the  classics  are  already 
the  ancients,  fighting  a  losing  battle 
against  the  moderns : 

Logic  has  the  students, 

Whereas  Grammar  is  reduced  in  numbers. 
•  •••••• 


40 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 


Civil  Law  rode  gorgeously 
And  Canon  Law  rode  haughtily 
Ahead  of  all  the  other  arts. 

If  the  absence  of  the  ancient  classics 
and  of  vernacular  literature  is  a  striking 
feature  of  the  university  curriculum  in 
arts,  an  equally  striking  fact  is  the 
amount  of  emphasis  placed  on  logic  or 
dialectic.  The  earliest  university  stat¬ 
utes,  those  of  Paris  in  1215,  require  the 
whole  of  Aristotle’s  logical  works,  and 
throughout  the  Middle  Ages  these  remain 
the  backbone  of  the  arts  course,  so  that 
Chaucer  can  speak  of  the  study  of  logic 
as  synonymous  with  attendance  at  a  uni¬ 
versity  — 

That  un-to  logik  hadde  longe  y-go. 

In  a  sense  this  is  perfectly  just,  for  logic 
was  not  only  a  major  subject  of  study  it¬ 
self,  it  pervaded  every  other  subject  as  a 
method  and  gave  tone  and  character  to 
the  mediaeval  mind.  Syllogism,  disputa¬ 
tion,  the  orderly  marshalling  of  argu- 

41 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

ments  for  and  against  specific  theses, 
these  became  the  intellectual  habit  of  the 
age  in  law  and  medicine  as  well  as  in  phi¬ 
losophy  and  theology.  The  logic,  of 
course,  was  Aristotle’s,  and  the  other 
works  of  the  philosopher  soon  followed, 
so  that  in  the  Paris  course  of  1254  we  find 
also  the  Ethics ,  the  Metaphysics ,  and  the 
various  treatises  on  natural  science  which 
had  at  first  been  forbidden  to  students. 
To  Dante  Aristotle  had  become  “  the 
Master  of  them  that  know,”  by  virtue  of 
the  universality  of  his  method  no  less  than 
of  his  all-embracing  learning.  “  The 
father  of  book  knowledge  and  the  grand¬ 
father  of  the  commentator,”  no  other 
writer  appealed  so  strongly  as  Aristotle 
to  the  mediaeval  reverence  for  the  text¬ 
book  and  the  mediaeval  habit  of  formal 
thought.  Doctrines  like  the  eternity  of 
matter  which  seemed  dangerous  to  faith 
were  explained  away,  and  great  and  au¬ 
thoritative  systems  of  theology  were  built 
up  by  the  methods  of  the  pagan  philos¬ 
opher.  And  all  idea  of  literary  form  dis- 

42 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 


appeared  when  everything  depended  on 
argument  alone. 

If  the  study  of  the  classics  became  con¬ 
fined  to  examples  and  excerpts  designed  to 
illustrate  the  rules  of  grammar,  rhetoric 
had  a  somewhat  different  fate  by  reason 
of  its  practical  applications.  The  intel¬ 
lectual  life  of  the  Middle  Ages  was  not 
characterized  by  spontaneous  or  widely 
diffused  power  of  literary  expression. 
Few  were  able  to  write,  still  fewer  could 
compose  a  letter,  and  the  professional 
scribes  and  notaries  on  whom  devolved 
the  greater  part  of  the  labor  of  mediaeval 
correspondence  fastened  upon  the  letter¬ 
writing  of  the  period  the  stereotyped 
formalism  of  a  conventional  rhetoric. 
Regular  instruction  in  the  composition  of 
letters  and  official  acts  was  given  in  the 
schools  and  chanceries,  and  numerous 
professors,  called  dictatores,  went  about 
from  place  to  place  teaching  this  valuable 
art  —  “  often  and  exceeding  necessary 
for  the  clergy,  for  monks  suitable,  and  for 
laymen  honorable,”  as  one  rhetorician 

43 


/ 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


tells  us.  By  the  thirteenth  century  such 
masters  had  found  a  place  in  certain  uni¬ 
versities,  especially  in  Italy  and  Southern 
France,  and  they  advertised  their  wares 
in  a  way  that  has  been  compared  to  the 
claims  of  a  modern  business  course  — 
short  and  practical,  with  no  time  wasted 
on  outgrown  classical  authors  but  every¬ 
thing  fresh  and  snappy  and  up-to-date, 
ready  to  be  applied  the  same  day  if  need 
be!  Thus  one  professor  at  Bologna  de¬ 
rides  the  study  of  Cicero,  whom  he  cannot 
recall  having  read,  and  promises  to  train 
his  students  in  writing  every  sort  of  letter 
and  official  document  which  was  de¬ 
manded  of  the  notaries  and  secretaries  of 
his  day.  Since,  as  we  shall  see  in  the  next 
lecture,  such  teachers  specialized  in  the 
composition  of  student  letters,  chiefly  skil¬ 
ful  appeals  to  the  parental  purse,  their 
practical  utility  was  at  once  apparent. 
“  Let  us,”  says  one  writer,  “  take  as  our 
theme  today  that  a  poor  and  diligent  stu¬ 
dent  at  Paris  is  to  write  his  mother  for 
necessary  expenses.”  Would  not  every 

44 


« 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 

listener  be  sure  that  here  at  least  he  had 
found  “  the  real  thing  ”  ?  The  professor 
of  rhetoric  might  also  be  called  in  to  draft 
a  university  prospectus,  like  the  circular 
issued  in  1229  by  the  masters  of  the  new 
University  of  Toulouse  setting  forth  its 
superiority  to  Paris  —  theologians  teach¬ 
ing  in  the  pulpits  and  preaching  at  the 
street  corners,  lawyers  magnifying  Jus¬ 
tinian  and  physicians  Galen,  professors  of 
grammar  and  logic,  and  musicians  with 
their  organs,  lectures  on  the  books  of  natu¬ 
ral  philosophy  then  forbidden  at  Paris, 
low  prices,  a  friendly  populace,  the  way 
now  prepared  by  the  extirpation  of  the 
thorns  of  heresy,  a  land  flowing  with  milk 
and  honey,  Bacchus  reigning  in  the  vine¬ 
yards  and  Ceres  in  the  fields  under  the 
mild  climate  desired  by  the  philosophers 
of  old,  with  plenary  indulgence  for  all 
masters  and  students.  Who  could  resist 
such  an  appeal  from  the  South? 

With  grammar  and  rhetoric  reduced  to 
a  subordinate  position  and  the  studies  of 
the  quadrivium  receiving  but  scant  at- 

45 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


tention,  the  arts  course  was  mainly  a 
course  in  logic  and  philosophy,  plus  so 
much  of  the  natural  sciences  as  could  be 
apprehended  by  the  scholastic  study  of 
the  “  natural  books  ”  of  Aristotle.  Lab¬ 
oratories  there  were  none  until  long  after 
the  Middle  Ages  were  past,  and  of  history 
and  the  social  sciences  nothing  was  heard 
in  universities  until  still  later.  Hard, 
close  drill  on  a  few  well-thumbed  books 
was  the  rule.  The  course  in  arts  led  nor¬ 
mally  to  the  master’s  degree  in  six  years, 
with  the  baccalaureate  somewhere  on  the 
way.  Graduation  in  arts  was  the  common 
preparation  for  professional  study,  be¬ 
ing  regularly  required  for  theology  and 
usual  for  intending  lawyers  and  physi¬ 
cians.  A  sound  tradition,  to  which  the 
American  world  has  given  too  little  at¬ 
tention! 

Contrary  to  a  common  impression, 
there  were  relatively  few  students  of  the¬ 
ology  in  mediaeval  universities,  for  a 
prescribed  theological  training  for  the 
priesthood  came  in  only  with  the  Counter- 

46 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 


Reformation.  The  requirements  for  ad¬ 
mission  were  high;  the  course  in  theology 
itself  was  long;  the  books  were  costly. 
True,  these  books  were  commonly  only 
the  Bible  and  the  Sentences  of  Peter 
Lombard,  but  the  Bible  in  the  Middle 
Ages  might  run  into  several  volumes, 
especially  when  accompanied  by  gloss  and 
commentary,  and  the  copying  of  these  by 
hand  was  a  tedious  and  costly  business. 
An  ambitious  student  at  Orleans  who  asks 
for  money  to  buy  a  Bible  and  begin 
theology  is  advised  by  his  father  to  turn 
rather  to  some  lucrative  profession.  At 
the  best,  complain  the  Paris  chancellors, 
students  come  late  to  theology,  which 
should  be  the  wife  of  their  youth. 

Medicine  likewise  was  studied  in  books, 
chiefly  Galen  and  Hippocrates  with  their 
Arabic  translators  and  commentators, 
among  whom  Avicenna  held  the  first 
place  after  the  thirteenth  century.  In¬ 
deed  Avicenna  was  still  more  firmly  in¬ 
trenched  in  the  East,  for  as  late  as  1887 
a  majority  of  the  native  physicians  in  the 

47 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


Persian  capital  “  knew  no  medicine  but 
that  of  Avicenna.”  1  Except  for  some 
advance  in  anatomy  and  surgery  at  cer¬ 
tain  southern  schools,  like  Bologna  and 
Montpellier,  the  mediaeval  universities 
made  no  contributions  to  medical  knowl¬ 
edge,  for  no  subject  was  less  adapted  to 
v'  their  prevailing  method  of  verbal  and 
syllogistic  dogmatism. 

In  law  the  basis  of  all  instruction  was 
inevitably  the  Corpus  Juris  Civilis  of 
Justinian,  for  the  customary  law  of  medi¬ 
aeval  Europe  was  never  a  subject  of  uni¬ 
versity  study.  The  central  book  wa§  the 
Digest ,  summarizing  the  ripest  fruits  of 
Roman  legal  science,  and  it  was  their 
mastery  of  the  Digest  that  gives  pre¬ 
eminence  to  the  mediaeval  civilians.  They 
brought  the  resources  of  the  whole  Corpus 
to  bear  on  each  passage  in  an  elaborate 
gloss,  and  they  showed  refinement  and 
subtlety  of  legal  thought  analogous  to 
that  of  the  scholastic  philosophers.  After 

all,  “  law  is  a  form  of  scholasticism.”  But 

1  E.  G.  Browne,  Arabian  Medicine  (1921),  p. 
93. 


48 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 

whereas  the  scholastic  method  in  philoso¬ 
phy  has  lost  hold  on  much  of  the  modern 
world,  the  work  of  the  glossators  still 
survives.  “  In  many  respects,”  says  Rash- 
dall,1  “  the  work  of  the  School  of  Bologna 
represents  the  most  brilliant  achievement 
of  the  intellect  of  mediaeval  Europe. 
The  mediaeval  mind  had,  indeed,  a  certain 
natural  affinity  for  the  study  and  devel¬ 
opment  of  an  already  existing  body  of 
Law.  The  limitations  of  its  knowledge 
of  the  past  and  of  the  material  Universe 
were  not,  to  any  appreciable  extent,  a  bar 
to  the  mastery  of  a  Science  which  con¬ 
cerns  itself  simply  with  the  business  and 
the  relations  of  every-day  life.  The  Jurist 
received  his  Justinian  on  authority  as  the 
Theologian  received  the  Canonical  and 
Patristic  writings,  or  the  Philosopher  his 
Aristotle,  while  he  had  the  advantage  of 
receiving  it  in  the  original  language.  It 
had  only  to  be  understood,  to  be  inter¬ 
preted,  developed,  and  applied.  .  .  .  The 
works  of  these  men  are,  perhaps,  the  only 

1  Universities ,  I,  pp.  254-255. 

49 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


productions  of  mediaeval  learning  to 
which  the  modern  Professor  of  any  sci¬ 
ence  whatever  may  turn,  not  merely  for 
the  sake  of  their  historical  interest,  not 
merely  in  the  hope  of  finding  ideas  of  a 
suggestive  value,  but  with  some  possibil¬ 
ity  of  finding  a  solution  of  the  doubts, 
difficulties  and  problems  which  still  beset 
the  modern  student.” 

The  canon  law  was  closely  associated 
with  the  civil,  indeed  for  many  purposes 
it  was  desirable  to  graduate  in  both  these 
subjects  as  a  Doctor  utriusque  juris ,  or 
as  we  say  a  J.U.D.  or  an  LL.  D.  Canon 
law  was  condemned  by  the  theologians  as 
a  “  lucrative  ”  subject,  which  drew  stu¬ 
dents  away  from  pure  learning  toward 
the  path  of  ecclesiastical  preferment.  By 
the  thirteenth  century  the  mediaeval 
church  was  a  vast  administrative  machine 
which  needed  lawyers  to  run  it,  and  a 
well-trained  canonist  had  a  good  chance 
of  rising  to  the  highest  dignities.1  No 

1  Sic  heredes  Gratiani 
Student  fieri  decani, 

Abbates,  pontifices. 

50 


/ 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 

wonder  canon  law  attracted  the  ambitious, 
the  wealthy,  even  the  idle,  for  at  Paris 
we  are  told  that  the  lazy  students  fre¬ 
quented  the  lectures  of  the  canonists  in 
the  middle  of  the  morning,  rather  than 
the  other  courses  which  began  at  six.  The 
standard  textbook  in  canon  law  was  the 
Decretum  of  Gratian,  supplemented  by 
the  decretals  of  subsequent  popes,  espe¬ 
cially  the  great  collection  which  Gregory 
IX  in  1234  distributed  to  the  principal 
universities.  The  methods  of  studying 
these  texts  were  the  same  as  in  the  civil 
law,  giving  rise  to  the  rich  canonistic  lit¬ 
erature  of  the  later  Middle  Ages  and  the 
marginal  glosses  for  which,  according  to 
Dante,  “  the  Gospel  and  the  great  doc¬ 
tors  are  deserted.” 

Of  the  textbooks  needed  in  all  these 
subjects  the  university  undertook  to  se¬ 
cure  a  supply  at  once  sufficient,  correct, 
and  cheap,  for  the  regulation  of  the  book 
trade  was  one  of  the  earliest  and  most 
valued  of  university  privileges.  As  books 
were  costly  they  were  commonly  rented, 

51 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

at  a  fixed  price  per  quire,  rather  than 
owned;  indeed  the  sale  of  books  was 
hedged  in  by  close  restrictions  designed 
to  curb  monopoly  prices  and  to  prevent 
their  removal  from  town.  The  earliest 
Paris  tariff,  ca.  1286,  lists  for  rent  copies 
of  one  hundred  and  thirty-eight  different 
books.  In  course  of  time  many  students 
came  to  have  books  of  their  own  —  a 
Bible,  or  at  least  some  part  of  it,  a  piece 
of  the  Digest ,  perhaps  even  the  “  twenty 
bokes  clad  in  blak  or  reed  ”  of  Chaucer’s 
Oxford  clerk.  Whether  rented  or  owned, 
the  supply  was  not  inconsiderable ;  on  the 
Bolognese  monuments  each  student  has 
a  book  before  him.  So  long  as  each  copy 
had  to  be  made  by  hand,  accuracy  was  a 
matter  of  much  importance,  and  the  uni¬ 
versity  had  its  supervisors  and  correctors 
who  inspected  periodically  all  the  books 
for  sale  in  the  town.  Moreover,  at  Bo¬ 
logna  a  constant  supply  of  new  books  was 
secured  by  the  requirement  that  every 
professor  should  turn  over  a  copy  of  his 
repetitions  and  disputations  to  the  station- 

52 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 


ers  for  publication.  The  principal  books 
of  law  and  theology  were  the  natural 
outgrowth  of  university  lectures.  With 
demand  and  supply  so  largely  concen¬ 
trated  in  the  universities,  it  is  not  surpris¬ 
ing  that  these  should  have  become  the 
chief  centres  of  the  book  trade  and,  as 
we  should  say,  of  the  publishing  business. 
So  long  as  students  could  rent  the  books 
they  required,  there  was  less  need  for  li¬ 
braries  than  we  might  at  first  suppose, 
and  it  was  quite  natural  that  for  long  the 
university  as  such  should  have  no  library. 
In  course  of  time,  however,  books  were 
given  for  the  use  of  students,  chiefly  in 
the  form  of  bequests  to  the  colleges,  where 
they  could  be  borrowed  or  consulted  on 
the  spot.  By  1338  the  oldest  extant  cat¬ 
alogue  of  the  Sorbonne,  the  chief  Paris 
library,  lists  1722  volumes,  many  of  them 
still  to  be  seen  in  the  Biblioth£que  Na¬ 
tional,  while  many  an  Oxford  college 
still  preserves  codices  which  belonged  to 
its  library  in  the  Middle  Ages. 


53 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


Turning  from  books  to  professors,  we 
should  note  at  the  outset  that  the  Middle 
Ages  produced  many  excellent  and  re¬ 
nowned  teachers.  The  mechanism  of 
learning  was  still  comparatively  simple, 
its  content  not  yet  overwhelming,  and,  in 
spite  of  the  close  adherence  to  texts,  there 
was  a  large  scope  for  the  personality  of 
the  instructor.  Thus,  long  before  the 
days  of  universities,  Alcuin  was  the  mov¬ 
ing  spirit  in  the  revival  of  education  at 
the  court  of  Charlemagne  and  the  monas¬ 
tery  school  of  Tours,  and  two  centuries 
later  Gerbert  of  Rheims  roused  the  won¬ 
der  of  contemporaries  by  his  skilful  use  of 
the  classics  in  the  study  of  rhetoric  and  by 
devices  for  the  teaching  of  astronomy  so 
ingenious  that  they  seemed  in  some  way 
“  divine.”  1  From  the  period  of  univer¬ 
sity  origins  we  get  a  fairly  clear  impres¬ 
sion  of  Abelard  as  a  teacher  and  ‘  class¬ 
room  entertainer,’  bold,  original,  lucid, 

1  Richer,  I,  cc.  45-54;  extracts  translated 
in  Taylor,  Mediaeval  Mind  (1919),  I,  pp. 
289-293. 


54 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 


sharply  polemical,  always  fresh  and  stim¬ 
ulating,  and  withal  “  able  to  move  to 
laughter  the  minds  of  serious  men.”  His 
procedure  as  exhibited  in  his  Sic  et  non 
was  to  marshal  authorities  and  argu¬ 
ments  for  and  against  specific  proposi¬ 
tions,  a  method  which  was  soon  imitated 
in  Gratian’s  Concord  of  Discordant  Can¬ 
ons,  and,  reenforced  by  the  New  Logic 
of  Aristotle,  was  to  culminate  in  the 
scholastic  method  of  St.  Thomas  Aquinas 
and  stamp  itself  upon  the  thought  of 
many  generations.  Sharpening  to  the 
wits  as  this  method  was  in  the  hands  of 
Abelard  and  his  successors,  the  very  an¬ 
tagonism  of  yes  or  no  as  he  formulated  it 
left  no  room  for  intermediate  positions, 
for  those  nuances  of  thought  in  which,  as 
Renan  pointed  out,  truth  is  usually  to  be 
found. 

For  a  contemporary  impression  of  the 
teachers  of  the  twelfth  century,  nothing  is 
so  good  as  the  oft-quoted  passages  in 
which  John  of  Salisbury  describes  his 
Wander jahre  in  France  from  1136  to 

55 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


1147,  chiefly  at  Paris  and  Chartres.1 
Learning  the  rudiments  of  dialectic  from 
Abelard,  he  continued  under  two  other 
teachers  of  this  art,  one  over-scrupulous 
in  detail,  perspicuous,  brief,  and  to  the 
point,  the  other  subtle  and  profuse,  show¬ 
ing  that  simple  answers  could  not  be 
given.  “  Afterward  one  of  them  went  to 
Bologna  and  unlearned  what  he  had 
taught,  so  that  on  his  return  he  also  un¬ 
taught  it.”  John  then  passed  on  to 
Chartres  to  study  grammar  under  William 
of  Conches  and  Bernard.  The  humane 
yet  thorough  teaching  of  literature  here 
excited  his  warm  admiration  —  close 
study,  memorizing  choice  extracts,  gram¬ 
mar  taught  by  composition,  imitation  of 
excellent  models  but  merciless  exposure  of 
borrowed  finery,  qualities  which  made  Ber¬ 
nard  “  the  most  copious  source  of  letters 

1  Translated  in  R.  L.  Poole,  Illustrations  of  the 
History  of  Mediaeval  Thought ,  pp.  203—212; 
A.  O.  Norton,  Readings  in  the  History  of  Educa¬ 
tion,  pp.  28-34.  What  we  know  of  these  masters 
is  analyzed  by  Poole  in  the  English  Historical  Re¬ 
view,  xxxv,  pp.  321-342  (1920). 

56 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 

in  Gaul  in  modern  times.”  Returning  to 
Paris  after  twelve  years’  absence,  John 
found  his  old  companions  “  as  before,  and 
where  they  were  before;  nor  did  they  ap¬ 
pear  to  have  reached  the  goal  in  unravel¬ 
ling  the  old  questions,  nor  had  they  added 
one  jot  of  a  proposition.  The  aims  that 
once  inspired  them,  inspired  them  still: 
they  had  progressed  in  one  point  only: 
they  had  unlearned  moderation,  they 
knew  not  modesty;  in  such  wise  that  one 
might  despair  of  their  recovery.  And 
thus  experience  taught  me  a  manifest 
conclusion,  that,  whereas  dialectic  furthers 
other  studies,  so  if  it  remain  by  itself  it  lies 
bloodless  and  barren,  nor  does  it  quicken 
the  soul  to  yield  fruit  of  philosophy,  ex¬ 
cept  the  same  conceive  from  elsewhere.” 

The  teachers  of  the  thirteenth  century 
who  talk  most  about  themselves  are  the 
professors  of  grammar  and  rhetoric  like 
Buoncompagno  at  Bologna,  John  of  Gar- 
lande  at  Paris,  Ponce  of  Provence  at 
Orleans,  and  Lorenzo  of  Aquileia  at 
Naples  and  almost  everywhere,  but  we 

57 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


shall  make  sufficient  acquaintance  with 
their  inflated  writings  in  other  connec¬ 
tions.  More  significant  is  the  account 
which  Odofredus  gives  of  his  lectures  on 
the  Old  Digest  at  Bologna : 

“  Concerning  the  method  of  teaching 
the  following  order  was  kept  by  ancient 
and  modern  doctors  and  especially  by  my 
own  master,  which  method  I  shall  ob¬ 
serve:  First,  I  shall  give  you  summaries 
of  each  title  before  I  proceed  to  the  text; 
second,  I  shall  give  you  as  clear  and  ex¬ 
plicit  a  statement  as  I  can  of  the  purport 
of  each  law  [included  in  the  title] ;  third, 
I  shall  read  the  text  with  a  view  to  correct¬ 
ing  it;  fourth,  I  shall  briefly  repeat  the 
contents  of  the  law;  fifth,  I  shall  solve 
apparent  contradictions,  adding  any  gen¬ 
eral  principles  of  law  [to  be  extracted 
from  the  passage],  commonly  called 
4  Brocardica,’  and  any  distinctions  or 
subtle  and  useful  problems  ( quaestiones ) 
arising  out  of  the  law  with  their  solutions, 
as  far  as  the  Divine  Providence  shall  en¬ 
able  me.  And  if  any  law  shall  seem  de- 

58 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 


serving,  by  reason  of  its  celebrity  or  diffi¬ 
culty,  of  a  repetition,  I  shall  reserve  it 
for  an  evening  repetition,  for  I  shall  dis¬ 
pute  at  least  twice  a  year,  once  before 
Christmas  and  once  before  Easter,  if  you 
like. 

“  I  shall  always  begin  the  Old  Digest  on 
or  about  the  octave  of  Michaelmas  [6 
October]  and  finish  it  entirely,  by  God’s 
help,  with  everything  ordinary  and  ex¬ 
traordinary,  about  the  middle  of  August. 
The  Code  I  shall  always  begin  about  a 
fortnight  after  Michaelmas  and  by  God’s 
help  complete  it,  with  everything  ordinary 
and  extraordinary,  about  the  first  of 
August.  Formerly  the  doctors  did  not 
lecture  on  the  extraordinary  portions; 
but  with  me  all  students  can  have  profit, 
even  the  ignorant  and  the  new-comers,  for 
they  will  hear  the  whole  book,  nor  will 
anything  be  omitted  as  was  once  the  com¬ 
mon  practice  here.  For  the  ignorant  can 
profit  by  the  statement  of  the  case  and  the 
exposition  of  the  text,  the  more  advanced 
can  become  more  adept  in  the  subtleties 

59 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


of  questions  and  opposing  opinions. 
And  I  shall  read  all  the  glosses,  which  was 
not  the  practice  before  my  time.”  Then 
comes  certain  general  advice  as  to  the 
choice  of  teachers  and  the  methods  of 
study,  followed  by  some  general  account 
of  the  Digest . 

This  course  closed  as  follows:  “Now 
gentlemen,  we  have  begun  and  finished 
and  gone  through  this  book  as  you  know 
who  have  been  in  the  class,  for  which  we 
thank  God  and  His  Virgin  Mother  and 
all  His  saints.  It  is  an  ancient  custom  in 
this  city  that  when  a  book  is  finished  mass 
should  be  sung  to  the  Holy  Ghost,  and  it 
is  a  good  custom  and  hence  should  be  ob¬ 
served.  But  since  it  is  the  practice  that 
doctors  on  finishing  a  book  should  say 
something  of  their  plans,  I  will  tell  you 
something  but  not  much.  Next  year  I 
expect  to  give  ordinary  lectures  well  and 

lawfully  as  I  always  have,  but  no  extraor- 

• 

linary  lectures,  for  students  are  not  good 
payers,  wishing  to  learn  but  not  to  pay, 
4s  the  saying  is:  All  desire  to  know  but 

00 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 


none  to  pay  the  price.  I  have  nothing 
more  to  say  to  you  beyond  dismissing  you 
with  God’s  blessing  and  begging  you  to 
attend  the  mass.”  1 

Important  as  was  the  formal  lecture  in 
those  days  of  few  books  and  no  labora¬ 
tories,  it  was  by  no  means  the  sole  vehicle 
of  instruction.  A  comprehensive  survey 
of  university  teaching  would  need  also  to 
take  account  of  the  less  formal  ‘  cursory  ’ 
or  ‘  extraordinary  ’  lectures,  many  of 
them  given  by  mere  bachelors ;  the  reviews 
and  4  repetitions,’  which  were  often  given 
in  hospices  or  colleges  in  the  evenings; 
and  the  disputations  which  prepared  for 
the  final  ordeal  of  maintaining  publicly 
the  graduation  thesis. 

The  class-rooms  in  which  these  lectures 
were  given  have  long  since  disappeared. 
If  the  master’s  house  had  no  suitable 
room,  he  literally  hired  a  hall  in  some  con- 


1  Paris,  Bibliotheque  Nationale,  MS.  Lat.  4489, 
f.  102;  Savigny,  Geschichte  des  romischen 
Rechts  im  Mittelalter  (1834),  III,  pp.  264, 
641,  663;  cf.  Rashdall,  I,  p.  219. 

61 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

venient  neighborhood.  At  Paris  such 
halls  were  mostly  in  a  single  street  on  the 
Left  Bank,  the  Vicus  Stramineus  or  Rue 
du  Fouarre  celebrated  by  Dante,  appar¬ 
ently  so-called  from  the  straw-covered 
floor  on  which  the  students  sat  as  they 
took  notes.  At  Bologna  the  class-rooms 
were  rather  more  ambitious.  Here  Buon- 
compagno,  writing  in  1235,  has  described 
an  ideal  lecture  hall,  quiet  and  clean,  with 
a  fair  prospect  from  its  windows,  its  walls 
painted  green  but  with  no  pictures  or  stat¬ 
ues  to  distract  attention,  the  lecturer’s  seat 
elevated  so  that  he  may  see  and  be  seen  by 
all,  the  seats  of  the  students  permanently 
assigned  by  nations  and  according  to  in¬ 
dividual  rank  and  fame ;  but  he  adds  sig¬ 
nificantly,  “  I  never  had  such  a  house  my¬ 
self  and  do  not  believe  any  of  this  sort  was 
ever  built.”  Our  knowledge  of  the  reali¬ 
ties  of  the  Bolognese  class-room  is  de¬ 
rived  chiefly  from  the  monuments  and 
miniatures  of  the  professors  of  the  four¬ 
teenth  and  fifteenth  centuries,  in  which 
the  master  is  regularly  seated  at  a  desk 

62 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 

under  a  canopy  on  a  raised  platform, 
while  the  students  have  flat  or  inclined 
desks  on  which  their  books  lie  open.  The 
professors,  in  medicine  as  in  law,  regu¬ 
larly  have  an  open  volume  before  them. 

The  nature  of  the  final  examination 
is  best  illustrated  at  Paris,  where  it  is  de¬ 
scribed  in  the  De  conscientia  of  that  ge¬ 
nial  moralist,  Robert  de  Sorbon,  founder 
of  the  Sorbonne,  by  means  of  a  suggestive 
parallel  with  the  Last  Judgment.  Taking 
as  his  text  Job’s  desire  that  his  “  adver¬ 
sary  had  written  a  book,”  and  outlining 
his  headings  in  the  approved  fashion  of 
his  time,  Robert  begins  with  the  statement 
that  if  any  one  decides  to  seek  the  licentia 
legendi  at  Paris  and  cannot  be  excused 
from  examination — as  many  of  the  great, 
by  special  favor,  are  —  he  would  much 
like  to  be  told  by  the  chancellor,  or  by 
some  one  in  his  confidence,  on  what  book 
he  would  be  examined.  Just  as  he  would 
be  a  crazy  student  indeed,  who,  having 
found  out  which  book  this  was,  should 
neglect  it  and  spend  his  time  on  others, 

63 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

even  so  is  he  mad  who  fails  to  study  the 
book  of  his  own  conscience,  in  which  we 
shall  all,  without  exception,  be  examined 
at  the  great  day.  Moreover,  if  any  one 
is  rejected  by  the  chancellor,  he  may  be  re¬ 
examined  after  a  year,  or  it  may  be  that, 
through  the  intercession  of  friends  or  by 
suitable  gifts  or  services  to  the  chancel¬ 
lor’s  relatives  or  other  examiners,  the 
chancellor  can  be  induced  to  change  his  de¬ 
cision;  whereas  at  the  Last  Judgment  the 
sentence  will  be  final  and  there  will  be  no 
help  from  wealth  or  influence  or  stout  as¬ 
sertion  of  ability  as  canonist  or  civilian  or 
of  familiarity  with  all  arguments  and  all 
fallacies.  Then,  if  one  fails  before  the 
chancellor  of  Paris,  the  fact  is  known  to 
but  five  or  six  and  the  mortification  passes 
away  in  time,  while  the  Great  Chancellor, 
God,  will  refute  the  sinner  ‘  in  full  univer¬ 
sity  ’  before  the  whole  world.  The  chan¬ 
cellor,  too,  does  not  flog  the  candidate,  but 
in  the  Last  Judgment  the  guilty  will  be 
beaten  with  a  rod  of  iron  from  the  valley 
of  Jehosaphat  through  the  length  of  hell, 

64 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 

nor  can  we  reckon,  like  idle  boys  in  the 
grammar-schools,  on  escaping  Saturday’s 
punishment  by  feigning  illness,  playing 
truant,  or  being  stronger  than  the  master, 
or  like  them  solace  ourselves  with  the 
thought  that  after  all  our  fun  is  well 
worth  a  whipping.  The  chancellor’s  ex¬ 
amination,  too,  is  voluntary ;  he  does 
not  force  any  one  to  seek  the  degree,  but 
waits  as  long  as  the  scholars  wish,  and  is 
even  burdened  with  their  insistent  de¬ 
mands  for  examinations.  In  studying 
the  book  of  our  conscience  we  should  imi¬ 
tate  the  candidates  for  the  license,  who 
eat  and  drink  sparingly,  conning  steadily 
the  one  book  they  are  preparing,  search¬ 
ing  out  all  the  authorities  that  pertain  to 
this,  and  hearing  only  the  professors  that 
lecture  on  this  subject,  so  that  they  have 
difficulty  in  concealing  from  their  fellows 
the  fact  that  they  are  preparing  for  ex¬ 
amination.  Such  preparation  is  not  the 
work  of  five  or  ten  days  —  though  there 
are  many  who  will  not  meditate  a  day  or 
an  hour  on  their  sins  —  but  of  many 

65 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

years.  At  the  examination  the  chancel¬ 
lor  asks,  “  Brother,  what  do  you  say  to 
this  question,  what  do  you  say  to  this  one 
and  this  one?”  The  chancellor  is  not 
satisfied  with  a  verbal  knowledge  of  books 
without  an  understanding  of  their  sense, 
but  unlike  the  Great  Judge,  who  will  hear 
the  book  of  our  conscience  from  beginning 
to  end  and  suffer  no  mistakes,  he  requires 
only  seven  or  eight  passages  in  a  book  and 
passes  the  candidate  if  he  answers  three 
questions  out  of  four.  Still  another  dif¬ 
ference  lies  in  the  fact  that  the  chancellor 
does  not  always  conduct  the  examination 
in  person,  so  that  the  student  who  would 
be  terrified  in  the  presence  of  so  much 
learning  often  answers  well  before  the 
masters  who  act  in  the  chancellor’s  place. 
Nothing  is  here  said  of  the  public  mainte¬ 
nance  of  a  thesis  against  all  comers,  an 
important  final  exercise  which  still  sur¬ 
vives  as  a  form  in  German  universities. 

At  Bologna  there  was  first  a  “  rigorous 
and  tremendous  examination  ”  before 
doctors,  each  sworn  to  treat  the  candidate 

66 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 

“  as  he  would  his  own  son.”  Then  fol¬ 
lowed  a  public  examination  and  inception 
which  a  letter  home  described  as  follows: 
“  £  Sing  unto  the  Lord  a  new  song,  praise 
him  with  stringed  instruments  and  organs, 
rejoice  upon  the  high-sounding  cymbals,’ 
for  your  son  has  held  a  glorious  disputa¬ 
tion,  which  was  attended  by  a  great  multi¬ 
tude  of  teachers  and  scholars.  He  an¬ 
swered  all  questions  without  a  mistake, 
and  no  one  could  prevail  against  his  argu¬ 
ments.  Moreover  he  celebrated  a  famous 
banquet,  at  which  both  rich  and  poor  were 
honored  as  never  before,  and  he  has  duly 
begun  to  give  lectures  which  are  already 
so  popular  that  others’  class-rooms  are 
deserted  and  his  own  are  filled.”  The 
same  rhetorician  also  tells  of  an  unsuccess¬ 
ful  candidate  who  could  do  nothing  in  the 
disputation  but  sat  in  his  chair  like  a 
goat  while  the  spectators  in  derision  called 
him  rabbi;  his  guests  at  the  banquet  had 
such  eating  that  they  had  no  will  to  drink, 
and  he  must  needs  hire  students  to  attend 
his  classes. 


67 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


The  social  position  of  mediaeval  pro¬ 
fessors  must  be  seen  against  the  back¬ 
ground  of  the  social  system  of  a  different 
age  from  ours.  We  come  perhaps  nearest 
to  modern  conditions  in  the  cities  of  Italy, 
where  there  is  evidence  in  the  Middle 
Ages  as  now  of  the  distinguished  position 
of  many  professors  of  medicine  and  civil 
law.  Many  theologians  and  teachers  of 
canon  law  reached  high  places  in  the 
church  such  as  bishoprics  and  cardinal- 
ates.  Among  the  theologians  and  phi¬ 
losophers  those  of  highest  distinction  were 
regularly  university  professors:  Thomas 
Aquinas,  Albertus  Magnus,  Bonaven- 
tura,  all  the  great  array  of  doctors  angelic, 
invincible,  irrefragable,  seraphic,  subtle, 
and  universal.  That  these  were  also  Do¬ 
minicans  or  Franciscans  withdrew  them 
only  partially  from  the  world. 

If,  as  some  reformers  maintain,  the 
social  position  and  self-respect  of  profes¬ 
sors  involve  their  management  of  univer¬ 
sity  affairs,  the  Middle  Ages  were  the 
great  age  of  professorial  control.  The 

68 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 

university  itself  was  a  society  of  masters 
when  it  was  not  a  society  of  students.  As 
there  were  no  endowments  of  importance 
there  were  no  boards  of  trustees,  nor  was 
there  any  such  system  of  state  control  as 
exists  on  the  Continent  or  in  many  parts 
of  the  United  States.  Administration  in 
the  modem  sense  was  strikingly  absent, 
but  much  time  was  consumed  in  various 
sorts  of  university  meetings.  In  a  quite 
remarkable  degree  the  university  was 
self-governing  as  well  as  self-respecting, 
escaping  some  of  the  abuses  of  a  system 
which  occasionally  allows  trustees  or  re¬ 
gents  to  speak  of  professors  as  their 
“  hired  men.”  Whether  the  individual 
professor  was  freer  under  such  a  system 
is  another  question,  for  the  corporation  of 
masters  was  apt  to  exercise  a  pretty  close 
control  over  action  if  not  over  opinion, 
and  the  tyranny  of  colleagues  is  a  form  of 
that  “  tyranny  of  one’s  next-door  neigh¬ 
bor  ”  from  which  the  world  seems  unable 
to  escape. 

There  remains  the  question  of  the  pro- 

69 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

fessor’s  intellectual  liberty,  the  right  to 
teach  truth  as  he  sees  it,  which  we  have 
come  to  call  academic  freedom.  It  is  plain 
that  much  depends  here,  as  with  Pilate, 
on  our  conception  of  truth.  If  it  is  some¬ 
thing  to  be  discovered  by  search,  the 
search  must  be  free  and  untrammelled. 
If,  however,  truth  is  something  which  has 
already  been  revealed  to  us  by  authority, 
then  it  has  only  to  be  expounded,  and  the 
expositor  must  be  faithful  to  the  authorita¬ 
tive  doctrine.  Needless  to  say,  the  latter 
was  the  mediaeval  conception  of  truth  and 
its  teaching.  “  Faith,”  it  was  held,  “  pre¬ 
cedes  science,  fixes  its  boundaries,  and 
prescribes  its  conditions.”  1  “  I  believe  in 
order  that  I  may  know,  I  do  not  know  in 
order  to  believe,”  said  Anselm.  If  reason 
has  its  bounds  thus  set,  it  befits  reason  to 
be  humble.  Let  not  the  masters  and  stu¬ 
dents  of  Paris,  says  Gregory  IX,  “  show 
themselves  philosophers,  but  let  them 
strive  to  become  God’s  learned.”  The 
dangers  of  intellectual  pride  and  reliance 
1  Alzog,  Church  History  (1876),  II,  p.  783. 

70 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 


upon  reason  alone  are  illustrated  by  many 
characteristic  stories  of  masters  struck 
dumb  in  the  midst  of  their  boasting,  like 
iStienne  de  Tournay,  who,  having  proved 
the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity  “  so  lucidly, 
so  elegantly,  so  catholically,”  asserted 
that  he  could  just  as  easily  demolish  his 
own  proof.  Mediaeval  orthodoxy  looked 
askance  at  mere  cleverness,  partly  because 
much  of  the  discussion  of  the  schools  led 
nowhere,  partly  because  a  mind  that 
played  too  freely  about  a  proposition 
might  easily  fall  into  heresy.  And  for  the 
detection  and  punishment  of  heresy  the 
mediaeval  church  organized  a  special  sys¬ 
tem  of  courts  known  as  the  Inquisition. 

Such  being  the  general  conditions,  what 
was  the  actual  situation?  In  practice  free¬ 
dom  was  general,  save  in  philosophy  and 
theology.  In  law,  in  medicine,  in  gram¬ 
mar  and  mathematics,  men  were  normally 
free  to  lecture  and  dispute  as  they  would. 
As  there  was  no  social  problem  in  the 
modern  sense  and  no  teaching  of  the  so¬ 
cial  sciences  as  such,  a  fruitful  source  of 

71 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

difficulty  was  absent.  So  far  as  I  know, 
no  mediaeval  professor  was  condemned 
for  preaching  free  trade  or  free  silver  or 
socialism  or  non-resistance.  Moreover, 
while  individual  treatises  might  be  pub¬ 
licly  burnt,  as  in  the  later  Roman  Empire, 
there  was  no  organized  censorship  of 
books  before  the  sixteenth  century. 

Now  as  to  philosophy  and  theology. 
The  trouble  lies  of  course  with  theology, 
for  philosophy  was  free  save  when  it 
touched  theological  questions.  But  then, 
philosophy  is  very  apt  to  touch  the¬ 
ological  questions,  and  all  through 
the  twelfth  and  thirteenth  centuries 
there  was  an  intermittent  fight  between 
Christian  theology  and  pagan  philos¬ 
ophy  as  represented  by  the  works  of 
Aristotle.  It  began  with  Abelard  when 
he  tried  to  apply  his  logical  method  of 
inquiry  to  theology,  and  it  went  on  when 
his  contemporary,  Gilbert  de  la  Porree,  di¬ 
rected  still  more  of  the  Aristotelian  logic 
toward  theological  speculation.  By  the 
end  of  the  twelfth  century,  the  New  Logic 

72 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 

was  pretty  well  assimilated,  but  then 
came  Aristotle’s  Metaphysics  and  natural 
philosophy,  with  their  Arabic  commenta¬ 
tors,  the  study  of  which  at  Paris  was 
formally  forbidden  in  1210  and  1215.  In 
1231  the  Pope  requires  them  to  be  “ex¬ 
amined  and  purged  of  all  suspicion  of 
error,”  but  by  1254  they  are  a  fixed  part 
of  the  curriculum  in  arts,  not  expurgated 
but  reconciled  by  interpretation  to  the 
Christian  faith.  A  generation  later  there 
is  a  recrudescence  of  Averroism,  empha¬ 
sizing  the  doctrine  of  the  eternity  of  mat¬ 
ter  and  the  determination  of  earthly  acts 
by  the  heavenly  bodies ;  and  two  hundred 
and  nineteen  errors  of  this  party  were  con¬ 
demned  in  1277  by  the  bishop  of  Paris, 
who  took  occasion  to  lament  incursions 
into  theology  on  the  part  of  students  of 
arts.  Throughout  this  period  the  whole 
of  Aristotle  was  taught  and  studied  at 
Paris,  and  his  method  was  used  by 
Thomas  Aquinas  to  rear  his  vast  struc¬ 
ture  of  scholastic  theology.  Others  re¬ 
served  for  themselves  a  wide  range  of 

73 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


philosophic  speculation,  and  in  case  of 
trouble  they  could  save  themselves  by 
falling  back  on  the  doctrine  that  what  was 
true  in  philosophy  might  be  false  in  the¬ 
ology,  and  vice  versa . 

With  an  eye  to  this  question  of  freedom 
of  teaching,  I  have  gone  through  all  the 
documents  of  the  thirteenth  century  in 
the  Paris  Chartularium.  Outside  of  the 
great  controversies  just  mentioned  the  re¬ 
sult  is  meagre.  In  1241  a  series  of  ten 
errors  was  examined  and  condemned  by 
the  chancellor  and  the  professors  of  the¬ 
ology,  a  very  abstract  series  of  proposi¬ 
tions  dealing  with  the  visibility  of  the  di¬ 
vine  essence,  angels,  and  the  exact  abid¬ 
ing-place  of  glorified  souls  in  the  next 
world,  whether  in  the  empyrean  or  the 
crystalline  heaven.  In  1247  it  appears 
that  a  certain  Master  Raymond  had  been 
imprisoned  for  his  errors  by  the  advice  of 
the  masters  of  theology,  and  one  John  de 
Brescain  had  been  deprived  of  his  right 
to  teach  because  of  certain  errors  in  logic 
“  which  seemed  to  come  near  Arian 


74 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 

heresy,”  thus  confusing  the  subjects  of 
the  two  faculties,  whose  bounds  had 
been  set  by  the  fathers.  In  and  about 
1255  Paris  was  in  a  ferment  over  the  so- 
called  4  Eternal  Gospel,’  an  apocalyptic 
treatise  which  foretold  a  new  era  of  the 
Spirit,  beginning  in  1260,  in  which  the 
New  Testament,  the  Pope,  and  the  hier¬ 
archy  should  be  superseded.  Accepted 
by  certain  advanced  Franciscans,  these 
doctrines  became  the  occasion  of  a  long 
conflict  with  the  Mendicant  orders,  but 
with  no  very  decisive  results.  In  1277 
Paris  received  notice  of  thirty  errors  in 
arts  condemned  at  Oxford,  not  as  heret¬ 
ical  but  as  sufficient  to  cause  the  deposi¬ 
tion  of  the  master  teaching  them;  but 
when  we  find  among  them  the  abolition 
of  the  cases  of  Latin  nouns  and  the  per¬ 
sonal  endings  of  verbs  ( ego  currit ,  tu 
currit ,  etc.),  we  are  likely  to  sympathize 
more  with  their  unfortunate  students  than 
with  the  deposed  masters.  One  is  re¬ 
minded  of  the  modern  definition  of  aca¬ 
demic  freedom  as  4  4  the  right  to  say  what  ^ 

75 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


one  thinks  without  thinking  what  one 
says!  ” 

With  these  as  the  only  notable  exam¬ 
ples  of  interference  with  free  teaching  at 
the  storm  centre  of  theological  specula¬ 
tion  in  the  most  active  period  of  its  his¬ 
tory,  we  must  infer  that  there  was  a  large 
amount  of  actual  freedom.  Trouble  arose 
almost  entirely  out  of  what  was  deemed 
theological  heresy,  or  undue  meddling 
with  theological  subjects  by  those  who 
lacked  theological  training.  Those  who 
stuck  to  their  job  seem  generally  to  have 
been  let  alone.  As  the  great  jurist  Cujas 
replied  in  the  sixteenth  century  when 
asked  whether  he  was  Protestant  or  Cath¬ 
olic,  Nihil  hoc  ad  edictum  praetoris.  Even 
within  the  more  carefully  guarded  field 
of  theology  and  philosophy,  it  is  doubtful 
whether  many  found  themselves  cramped. 
Accepting  the  principle  of  authority  as 
their  starting-point,  men  did  not  feel  its 
limitations  as  we  should  feel  them  now. 
A  fence  is  no  obstacle  to  those  who  do  not 
desire  to  go  outside,  and  many  barriers 

76 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  PROFESSOR 

that  would  seem  intolerable  to  a  more 
sceptical  age  were  not  felt  as  barriers  by 
the  schoolmen.  He  is  free  who  feels  him¬ 
self  free. 

Furthermore,  for  those  accustomed  to 
the  wide  diversities  of  the  modern  world, 
it  is  easy  to  form  a  false  impression  of  the 
uniformity  and  sameness  of  mediaeval 
thought.  Scholasticism  was  not  one  thing 
but  many,  as  its  historians  constantly  re¬ 
mind  us,  and  the  contests  between  differ¬ 
ent  schools  and  shades  of  opinion  were  as 
keen  as  among  the  Greeks  or  in  our  own 
day.  And  if  the  differences  often  seem 
minute  or  unreal  to  our  distant  eye,  we 
can  make  them  modern  enough  by  turn¬ 
ing,  for  example,  to  the  old  question  of 
the  nature  of  universal  conceptions,  which 
divided  the  Nominalists  and  Realists  of 
the  Middle  Ages.  Are  universals  mere 
names,  or  have  they  a  real  existence,  in¬ 
dependent  of  their  individual  embodi¬ 
ments?  A  bit  arid  it  all  sounds  if  we 
make  it  merely  a  matter  of  logic,  but  ex¬ 
citing  enough  as  soon  as  it  becomes  a 

77 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


question  of  life.  The  essence  of  the  Ref¬ 
ormation  lies  implicit  in  whether  we  take 
a  nominalist  or  a  realist  view  of  the 
church ;  the  central  problem  of  politics  de¬ 
pends  largely  upon  a  nominalist  or  a  real¬ 
ist  view  of  the  state.  Upon  the  two  sides 
of  this  last  question  millions  of  men  have 
“  all  uncouthly  died,”  all  unconsciously 
too,  no  doubt,  in  the  majority  of  cases, 
unaware  of  the  ultimate  issues  of  political 
authority  for  which  they  fought,  but  yet 
able  to  comprehend  them  when  expressed 
in  the  concrete  form  of  putting  the  in¬ 
terest  of  the  state  above  the  interest  of  its 
members. 

In  his  own  time  and  his  own  way  the 
mediaeval  professor  often  dealt  with  per¬ 
manent  human  interests  as  he  sharpened 
men’s  wits  and  kept  alive  the  continuous 
tradition  of  learning. 


78 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 


III 

THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 

“A  University,"  it  has  more  than 
once  been  remarked  by  professors,  “  would 
be  a  very  comfortable  place  were  it  not 
for  the  students.”  So  far  we  have  been 
considering  universities  from  the  point  of 
view  of  professors;  it  is  now  the  turn  of 
the  students,  for  whether  these  be  re- 

t 

garded  as  a  necessary  evil  or  as  the  main 
reason  for  the  university’s  existence,  they 
certainly  cannot  be  ignored.  A  mediae¬ 
val  university  was  no  regiment  of  colo¬ 
nels  but  “  a  society  of  masters  and 
scholars  ”  and  to  this  second  and  more 
numerous  element  we  must  now  direct 
our  attention. 

The  mediaeval  student  is  a  more  elu¬ 
sive  figure  than  his  teachers,  for  he  is 
individually  less  conspicuous  and  must 
generally  be  seen  in  the  mass.  Moreover 

79 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

the  mass  is  much  diversified  in  time  and 
space,  so  that  generalization  is  difficult, 
what  is  true  of  one  age  and  one  univer¬ 
sity  being  quite  untrue  of  other  times  and 
places.  Even  within  the  briefer  span  of 
American  universities  there  are  wide 
differences  among  the  students  of,  let  us 
say,  Harvard  in  the  seventeenth  century, 
William  and  Mary  in  the  eighteenth  cen¬ 
tury,  California  in  the  nineteenth  century, 
and  Columbia  in  the  twentieth  century; 
and  it  would  be  impossible  to  make  a  true 
picture  out  of  elements  drawn  indiscrimi¬ 
nately  from  such  disparate  sources.  Un¬ 
til  the  conditions  at  each  university  of  the 
Middle  Ages  shall  have  been  studied 
chronologically,  no  sound  account  of  stu¬ 
dent  life  in  general  can  be  written,  and 
this  preliminary  labor  has  nowhere  been 
systematically  attempted.  At  present  we 
can  do  no  more  than  indicate  the  principal 
sources  of  our  information  and  the  kind 
of  light  they  throw  upon  student  life. 

Fortunately,  out  of  the  scattered  re¬ 
mains  of  mediaeval  times,  there  has  come 

80 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 

down  to  us  a  considerable  body  of  ma¬ 
terial  which  deals,  more  or  less  directly, 
with  student  affairs.  There  are,  for  one 
thing,  the  records  of  the  courts  of  law, 
which,  amid  the  monotonous  detail  of 
petty  disorders  and  oft-repeated  offences, 
preserve  now  and  then  a  vivid  bit  of 
mediaeval  life  —  like  the  case  of  the 
Bolognese  student  who  was  attacked  with 
a  cutlass  in  a  class-room,  to  the  great 
damage  and  loss  of  those  assembled  to 
hear  the  lecture  of  a  noble  and  egregious 
doctor  of  laws;  or  the  student  in  1289 
who  was  set  upon  in  the  street  in  front 
of  a  lecture-room  by  a  certain  scribe, 
“  who  wounded  him  on  the  head  with  a 
stone,  so  that  much  blood  gushed  forth,” 
while  two  companions  gave  aid  and  coun¬ 
sel,  saying,  “  Give  it  to  him,  hit  him,” 
and  when  the  offence  had  been  committed 
ran  away.  So  the  coroners’  rolls  of  Ox¬ 
ford  record  many  a  fatal  issue  of  town 
and  gown  riots,  while  a  recently  published 
register  of  1265  and  1266  shows  the 
students  of  Bologna  actively  engaged  in 

81 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


raising  money  by  loans  and  by  the  sale  of 
text-books.  There  are  of  course  the 
university  and  college  statutes,  with  their 
prohibitions  and  fines,  regulating  the 
subjects  of  conversation,  the  shape  and 
color  of  caps  and  gowns,  that  academic 
dress  which  looks  to  us  so  mediaeval  and 
is,  especially  in  its  American  form,  so 
very  modern;  careful  also  of  the  weight¬ 
ier  matters  of  the  law,  like  the  enactment 
of  New  College  against  throwing  stones 
in  chapel,  or  the  graded  penalties  at 
Leipzig  for  him  who  picks  up  a  missile 
to  throw  at  a  professor,  him  who  throws 
and  misses,  and  him  who  accomplishes  his 
fell  purpose  to  the  master’s  hurt.  The 
chroniclers,  too,  sometimes  interrupt  their 
narrative  of  the  affairs  of  kings  and 
princes  to  tell  of  students  and  their  doings, 
although  their  attention,  like  that  of  their 
modern  successors,  the  newspapers,  is 
apt  to  be  caught  by  outbreaks  of  student 
lawlessness  rather  than  by  the  wholesome 
routine  of  academic  life. 

Then  we  have  the  preachers  of  the  time, 

82 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 

many  of  them  also  professors,  whose  ser¬ 
mons  contain  frequent  allusions  to  stu¬ 
dent  customs;  indeed  if  further  evidence 
were  needed  to  dispel  the  illusion  that  the 
mediaeval  university  was  devoted  to  bib¬ 
lical  study  and  religious  nurture,  the 
Paris  preachers  of  the  period  would  offer 
sufficient  proof.  “  The  student’s  heart 
is  in  the  mire,”  says  one  of  them,  “  fixed 
on  prebends  and  things  temporal  and  how 
to  satisfy  his  desires.”  “  They  are  so  liti¬ 
gious  and  quarrelsome  that  there  is  no 
peace  with  them;  wherever  they  go,  be  it 
Paris  or  Orleans,  they  disturb  the  country, 
their  associates,  even  the  whole  univer¬ 
sity.”  Many  of  them  go  about  the  streets 
armed,  attacking  the  citizens,  breaking 
into  houses,  and  abusing  women.  They 
quarrel  among  themselves  over  dogs, 
women,  or  what-not,  slashing  off  one 
another’s  fingers  with  their  swords,  or, 
with  only  knives  in  their  hands  and 
nothing  to  protect  their  tonsured  pates, 
rush  into  conflicts  from  which  armed 
knights  would  hold  back.  Their  com- 

83 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


patriots  come  to  their  aid,  and  soon  whole 
nations  of  students  may  be  involved  in 
the  fray.  These  Paris  preachers  take  us 
into  the  very  atmosphere  of  the  Latin 
quarter  and  show  us  much  of  its  varied 
activity.  We  hear  the  cries  and  songs 
of  the  streets  — 

Li  tens  s’  en  veit, 

Et  je  n’  ei  riens  fait; 

Li  tens  revient, 

Et  je  ne  fais  riens  — 

the  students’  tambourines  and  guitars, 
their  “  light  and  scurrilous  words,”  their 
hisses  and  handclappings  and  loud  shouts 
of  applause  at  sermons  and  disputations. 
We  watch  them  as  they  mock  a  neighbor 
for  her  false  hair  or  stick  out  their  tongues 
and  make  faces  at  the  passers-by.  We 
see  the  student  studying  by  his  window, 
talking  over  his  future  with  his  room¬ 
mate,  receiving  visits  from  his  parents, 
nursed  by  friends  when  he  is  ill,  singing 
psalms  at  a  student’s  funeral,  or  visiting 
a  fellow-student  and  asking  him  to  visit 

84 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 


him  —  “I  have  been  to  see  you,  now  come 
to  our  hospice.” 

All  types  are  represented.  There  is  the 
poor  student,  with  no  friend  but  St. 
Nicholas,  seeking  such  charity  as  he  can 
find  or  earning  a  pittance  by  carrying 
holy  water  or  copying  for  others,  in  a  fair 
but  none  too  accurate  hand,  sometimes 
too  poor  to  buy  books  or  afford  the  ex¬ 
pense  of  a  course  in  theology,  yet  usually 
surpassing  his  more  prosperous  fellows 
who  have  an  abundance  of  books  at  which 
they  never  look.  There  is  the  well-to-do 
student,  who  besides  his  books  and  desk 
will  be  sure  to  have  a  candle  in  his  room 
and  a  comfortable  bed  with  a  soft  mat¬ 
tress  and  luxurious  coverings,  and  will 
be  tempted  to  indulge  the  mediaeval 
fondness  for  fine  raiment  beyond  the 
gown  and  hood  and  simple  wardrobe 
prescribed  by  the  statutes.  Then  there 
are  the  idle  and  aimless,  drifting  about 
from  master  to  master  and  from  school 
to  school,  and  never  hearing  full  courses 
or  regular  lectures.  Some,  who  care  only 

85 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

for  the  name  of  scholar  and  the  income 
which  they  receive  while  attending  the 
university,  go  to  class  but  once  or  twice 
a  week,  choosing  by  preference  the  lec¬ 
tures  on  canon  law,  which  leave  them 
plenty  of  time  for  sleep  in  the  morning. 
Many  eat  cakes  when  they  ought  to  be  at 
study,  or  go  to  sleep  in  the  class-rooms, 
spending  the  rest  of  their  time  drinking 
in  taverns  or  building  castles  in  Spain 
(castella  in  Hispania) ;  and  when  it  is 
time  to  leave  Paris,  in  order  to  make  some 
show  of  learning  such  students  get  to¬ 
gether  huge  volumes  of  calfskin,  with 
wide  margins  and  fine  red  bindings,  and 
so  with  wise  sack  and  empty  mind  they 
go  back  to  their  parents.  “  What  knowl¬ 
edge  is  this,”  asks  the  preacher,  “  which 
thieves  may  steal,  mice  or  moths  eat  up, 
fire  or  water  destroy?  ”  and  he  cites  an 
instance  where  the  student’s  horse  fell 
into  a  river,  carrying  all  his  books  with 
him.  Some  never  go  home,  but  continue 
to  enjoy  in  idleness  the  fruits  of  their 
benefices.  Even  in  vacation  time,  when 

86 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 

the  rich  ride  off  with  their  servants  and 
the  poor  trudge  home  under  the  burning 
sun,  many  idlers  remain  in  Paris  to  their 
own  and  the  city’s  harm.  Mediaeval 
Paris,  we  should  remember,  was  not  only 
the  incomparable  “  parent  of  the  sciences,” 
but  also  a  place  of  good  cheer  and  good 
fellowship  and  varied  delights,  a  favorite 
resort  not  only  of  the  studious  but  of 
country  priests  on  a  holiday ;  and  it  would 
not  be  strange  if  sometimes  scholars  pro¬ 
longed  their  stay  unduly  and  lamented 
their  departure  in  phrases  which  are  some¬ 
thing  more  than  rhetorical  commonplace. 

Then  the  student  is  not  unknown  to  the 
poets  of  the  period,  among  whom  Ru- 
tebeuf  gives  a  picture  of  thirteenth- 
century  Paris  not  unlike  that  of  the 
sermonizers,  while  in  the  preceding  cen¬ 
tury  Jean  de  Haute ville  shows  the  misery 
of  the  poor  and  diligent  scholar  falling 
asleep  over  his  books,  and  Nigel  “  Wire- 
ker  ”  satirizes  the  English  students  at 
Paris  in  the  person  of  an  ass,  Brunellus, 
—  “  Daun  Burnell  ”  in  Chaucer  —  who 


87 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


studies  there  seven  years  without  learning 
a  word,  braying  at  the  end  as  at  the  be¬ 
ginning  of  his  course,  and  leaving  at  last 
with  the  resolve  to  become  a  monk  or  a 
bishop.  Best  of  all  is  Chaucer’s  incom¬ 
parable  portrait  of  the  clerk  of  Oxen- 
ford,  hollow,  threadbare,  unworldly  — 

For  him  was  lever  have  at  his  beddes  heed 
Twenty  bokes,  clad  in  blak  or  reed, 

Of  Aristotle  and  his  philosophye, 

Than  robes  riche,  or  fithele,  or  gay  sautrye. 
•  •••••• 

Souninge  in  moral  vertu  was  his  speche, 

And  gladly  wolde  he  lerne,  and  gladly  teche. 

But  after  all,  no  one  knows  so  much 
about  student  life  as  the  students  them¬ 
selves,  and  it  is  particularly  from  what 
was  written  by  and  for  them,  the  student 
literature  of  the  Middle  Ages,  that  I  wish 
to  draw  more  at  length.  Such  remains 
of  the  academic  past  fall  into  three 
chief  classes:  student  manuals,  student 
letters,  and  student  poetry.  Let  us  con¬ 
sider  them  in  this  order. 


88 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 

The  manuals  of  general  advice  and 
counsel  addressed  to  the  mediaeval 
scholar  do  not  call  for  extended  con¬ 
sideration.  F ormal  treatises  on  the  whole 
duty  of  students  are  characteristic  of  the 
didactic  habit  of  mind  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  but  the  advice  which  they  con¬ 
tain  is  apt  to  be  of  a  very  general  sort, 
applicable  to  one  age  as  well  as  an¬ 
other  and  lacking  in  those  concrete  illus¬ 
trations  which  enliven  the  sermons  of  the 
period  into  useful  sources  for  university 
life. 

A  more  interesting  type  of  student 
manual,  the  student  dictionary,  owes  its 
existence  to  the  position  of  Latin  as  the 
universal  language  of  mediaeval  educa¬ 
tion.  Text-books  were  in  Latin,  lectures 
were  in  Latin,  and,  what  is  more,  the  use 
of  Latin  was  compulsory  in  all  forms  of 
student  intercourse.  This  rule  may  have 
been  designed  as  a  check  on  conversation, 
as  well  as  an  incentive  to  learning,  but  it 
was  enforced  by  penalties  and  informers 
(called  wolves),  and  the  freshman,  or 

89 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

yellow-beak,  as  he  was  termed  in  mediae¬ 
val  parlance,  might  find  himself  but  ill 
equipped  for  making  himself  understood 
in  his  new  community.  For  his  con¬ 
venience  a  master  in  the  University  of 
Paris  in  the  thirteenth  century,  John  of 
Garlande,  prepared  a  descriptive  vocabu¬ 
lary,  topically  arranged  and  devoting  a 
large  amount  of  space  to  the  objects  to 
be  seen  in  the  course  of  a  walk  through 
the  streets  of  Paris.  The  reader  is  con¬ 
ducted  from  quarter  to  quarter  and  from 
trade  to  trade,  from  the  book-stalls  of  the 
Parvis  Notre-Dame  and  the  fowl-market 
of  the  adjoining  Rue  Neuve  to  the 
money-changers’  tables  and  goldsmiths’ 
shops  on  the  Grand-Pont  and  the  bow- 
makers  of  the  Porte  S.-Lazare,  not  omit¬ 
ting  the  classes  of  ouvrieres  whose  ac¬ 
quaintance  the  student  was  most  likely 
to  make.  Saddlers  and  glovers,  furriers, 
cobblers,  and  apothecaries,  the  clerk 
might  have  use  for  the  wares  of  all  of 
them,  as  well  as  the  desk  and  candle  and 
writing-materials  which  were  the  special 

90 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 

tools  of  his  calling;  but  his  most  frequent 
relations  were  with  the  purveyors  of  food 
and  drink,  whose  agents  plied  their  trade 
vigorously  through  the  streets  and  lanes 
of  the  Latin  quarter  and  worked  off  their 
poorer  goods  on  scholars  and  their  ser¬ 
vants.  There  were  the  hawkers  of  wine, 
crying  their  samples  of  different  quali¬ 
ties  from  the  taverns;  the  fruit-sellers, 
deceiving  clerks  with  lettuce  and  cress, 
cherries,  pears,  and  green  apples;  and  at 
night  the  vendors  of  light  pastry,  with 
their  carefully  covered  baskets  of  wafers, 
waffles,  and  rissoles  —  a  frequent  stake 
at  the  games  of  dice  among  students, 
who  had  a  custom  of  hanging  from  their 
windows  the  baskets  gained  by  lucky 
throws  of  the  six.  The  patissiers  had  also 
more  substantial  wares  suited  to  the  cler¬ 
ical  taste,  tarts  filled  with  eggs  and  cheese 
and  well-peppered  pies  of  pork,  chicken, 
and  eels.  To  the  rotissiers  scholars’  ser¬ 
vants  resorted,  not  only  for  the  pigeons, 
geese,  and  other  fowl  roasted  on  their 
spits,  but  also  for  uncooked  beef,  pork, 

91 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

and  mutton,  seasoned  with  garlic  and 
other  strong  sauces.  Such  fare,  however, 
was  not  for  the  poorer  students,  whose 
slender  purses  limited  them  to  tripe  and 
various  kinds  of  sausage,  over  which  a 
quarrel  might  easily  arise  and  “  the 
butchers  be  themselves  butchered  by 
angry  scholars.” 

A  dictionary  of  this  sort  easily  passes 
into  another  type  of  treatise,  the  manual 
of  conversation.  This  method  of  study¬ 
ing  foreign  languages  is  old,  as  survivals 
from  ancient  Egypt  testify,  and  it  still 
spreads  its  snares  for  the  unwary  travel¬ 
ler  who  prepares  to  conquer  Europe  a  la 
Ollendorff.  To  the  writers  of  the  later 
Middle  Ages  it  seemed  to  offer  an  ex¬ 
ceptional  opportunity  for  combining 
Instruction  in  Latin  with  sound  academic 
discipline,  and  from  both  school  and 
university  it  left  its  monuments  for  our 
perusal.  The  most  interesting  of  these 
handbooks  is  entitled  a  “  Manual  of 
Scholars  who  propose  to  attend  univer¬ 
sities  of  students  and  to  profit  therein/’ 

92 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 

and  while  in  its  most  common  form  it  is 
designed  for  the  students  of  Heidelberg 
about  the  year  1480,  it  could  be  adapted 
with  slight  changes  to  any  of  the  German 
universities.  “  Hollo  at  Heidelberg,’’  we 
might  call  it.  Its  eighteen  chapters  con¬ 
duct  the  student  from  his  matriculation 
to  his  degree,  and  inform  him  by  the  way 
on  many  subjects  quite  unnecessary  for 
either.  When  the  young  man  arrives  he 
registers  from  Ulm;  his  parents  are  in 
moderate  circumstances;  he  has  come  to 
study.  He  is  then  duly  hazed  after  the 
German  fashion,  which  treats  the  candi¬ 
date  as  an  unclean  beast  with  horns  and 
tusks  which  must  be  removed  by  officious 
fellow-students,  who  also  hear  his  con¬ 
fession  of  sin  and  fix  as  the  penance  a 
good  dinner  for  the  crowd.  He  begins 
his  studies  by  attending  three  lectures  a 
day,  and  learns  to  champion  nominalism 
against  realism  and  the  comedies  of 
Terence  against  the  law,  and  to  discuss 
the  advantages  of  various  universities 
and  the  price  of  food  and  the  quality  of 

93 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

the  beer  in  university  towns.  Then  we 
find  him  and  his  room-mate  quarrelling 
over  a  mislaid  book;  rushing  at  the  first 
sound  of  the  bell  to  dinner,  where  they 
debate  the  relative  merits  of  veal  and 
beans ;  or  walking  in  the  fields  beyond  the 
Neckar,  perhaps  by  the  famous  Philoso¬ 
phers’  Road  which  has  charmed  so  many 
generations  of  Heidelberg  youth,  and 
exchanging  Latin  remarks  on  the  birds 
and  fish  as  they  go.  Then  there  are 
shorter  dialogues:  the  scholar  breaks  the 
statutes;  he  borrows  money,  and  gets  it 
back;  he  falls  in  love  and  recovers;  he 
goes  to  hear  a  fat  Italian  monk  preach  or 
to  see  the  jugglers  and  the  jousting  in 
the  market-place ;  he  knows  the  dog-days 
are  coming  —  he  can  feel  them  in  his 
head!  Finally  our  student  is  told  by  his 
parents  that  it  is  high  time  for  him  to 
take  his  degree  and  come  home.  At  this 
he  is  much  disturbed;  he  has  gone  to  few 
lectures,  and  he  will  have  to  swear  that 
he  has  attended  regularly;  he  has  not 
worked  much  and  has  incurred  the  enmity 

94 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 

of  many  professors;  his  master  discour¬ 
ages  him  from  trying  the  examination; 
he  fears  the  disgrace  of  failure.  But  his 
interlocutor  reassures  him  by  a  pertinent 
quotation  from  Ovid  and  suggests  that  a 
judicious  distribution  of  gifts  may  do 
much  —  a  few  florins  will  win  him  the 
favor  of  all.  Let  him  write  home  for  more 
money  and  give  a  great  feast  for  his 
professors ;  if  he  treats  them  well,  he  need 
not  fear  the  outcome.  This  advice  throws 
a  curious  light  upon  the  educational 
standards  of  the  time;  it  appears  to  have 
been  followed,  for  the  manual  closes  with 
a  set  of  forms  inviting  the  masters  to  the 
banquet  and  the  free  bath  by  which  it 
was  preceded. 

If  university  students  had  need  of  such 
elementary  compends  of  morals  and  man¬ 
ners,  there  was  obviously  plenty  of  room 
for  them  in  the  lower  schools  as  well, 
where  they  were  apt  to  take  the  form  of 
Latin  couplets  which  could  be  readily 
impressed  upon  the  pupil’s  memory. 
Such  statuta  vel  precepta  scolarium  seem 

95 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

to  have  been  especially  popular  in  the 
later  fifteenth  century  in  those  city  schools 
of  Germany  whose  importance  has  been 
so  clearly  brought  out  by  recent  historians 
of  secondary  education.  Wandering 
often  from  town  to  town,  like  the  roving 
scholars  of  an  earlier  age,  these  German 
boys  had  good  need  to  observe  the  moral 
maxims  thus  purveyed.  The  beginning 
of  wisdom  was  to  remember  God  and  obey 
the  master,  but  the  student  had  also  to 
watch  his  behavior  in  church  and  lift  up 
his  voice  in  the  choir  —  compulsory  at¬ 
tendance  at  church  and  singing  in  the 
choir  being  a  regular  feature  of  these 
schools  —  keep  his  books  clean,  and  pay 
his  school  bills  promptly.  Face  and  hands 
should  be  washed  in  the  morning,  but 
the  baths  should  not  be  visited  without 
permission,  nor  should  boys  run  on  the 
ice  or  throw  snowballs.  Sunday  was  the 
day  for  play,  but  this  could  be  only  in 
the  churchyard,  where  boys  must  be  care¬ 
ful  not  to  play  with  dice  or  break  stones 
from  the  wall  or  throw  anything  over  the 

96 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 


church.  And  whether  at  play  or  at  home, 
Latin  should  always  be  spoken. 

More  systematic  is  a  manual  of  the 
fifteenth  century  preserved  in  a  manu¬ 
script  of  the  Bibliotheque  Nationale  at 
Paris.1  “  Since  by  reason  of  imbecility 
youths  cannot  advance  to  a  knowledge  of 
the  Latin  tongue  by  theory  alone,”  the 
author  has  for  their  assistance  prepared 
a  set  of  forms  which  contain  the  expres¬ 
sions  most  frequently  employed  by  clerks. 
Beginning  with  the  courtesies  of  school 
life,  for  obedience  and  due  reverence  for 
the  master  are  the  beginning  of  wisdom, 
the  boy  learns  how  to  greet  his  master  and 
to  take  leave,  how  to  excuse  himself  for 
wrong-doing,  how  to  invite  the  master  to 
dine  or  sup  with  his  parents  —  there  are 
half  a  dozen  forms  for  this!  He  is  also 
taught  how  to  give  proper  answers  to 
those  who  seek  to  test  his  knowledge, 
“  that  he  may  not  appear  an  idiot  in  the 
sight  of  his  parents.”  “  If  the  master 
asks,  ‘Where  have  you  been  so  long?’”  he 

1  MS.  Lat.  n.  a.  619,  ff.  28-35. 

97 


r 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


must  be  ready,  not  only  to  plead  the  inevi¬ 
table  headache  or  failure  to  wake  up,  but 
also  to  express  the  causes  of  delay  well 
known  to  any  village  boy.  He  had  to  look 
after  the  house  or  feed  the  cattle  or  water 
the  horse;  he  was  detained  by  a  wedding, 
by  picking  grapes,  or  making  out  bills,  or 
—  for  these  were  German  boys  —  by 
helping  with  the  brew,  fetching  beer,  or 
serving  drink  to  guests. 

In  school  after  the  “  spiritual  refec¬ 
tion  ”  of  the  morning  singing-lesson 
comes  refection  of  the  body,  which  is 
placed  after  study  hours  because  “  the 
imaginative  virtue  is  generally  impeded  in 
those  who  are  freshly  sated.”  In  their 
talk  at  luncheon  or  on  the  playground 
“  clerks  are  apt  to  fall  from  the  Latin 
idiom  into  the  mother  tongue,”  and  for 
him  who  speaks  German  the  discretion  of 
the  master  has  invented  a  dunce’s  symbol 
called  an  ass,  which  the  holder  tries  hard 
to  pass  on  to  another.  “  Wer  wel  ein 
Griffel  kouffe[n]  ?  ”  “  Ich  wel  ein  Griffel 
kouffen.”  “  Tecum  sit  asinus.”  “  Ach, 


98 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 

quam  falsus  es  tu!”  Sometimes  the 
victim  offers  to  meet  his  deceiver  after 
vespers,  with  the  usual  schoolboy  brag  on 
both  sides.  As  it  is  forbidden  to  come  to 
blows  in  school,  the  boys  are  taught  to 
work  off  their  enmities  and  formulate 
their  complaints  in  Latin  dialogue.  “  You 
were  outside  the  town  after  dark.  You 
played  with  laymen  Sunday.  You  went 
swimming  Monday.  You  stayed  away 
from  matins.  You  slept  through  mass.” 
“Reverend  master,  he  has  soiled  my  book, 
he  shouts  after  me  wherever  I  go,  he  calls 
me  names.”  Besides  the  formal  dis¬ 
putations  the  scholars  discuss  such 
current  events  as  a  street  fight,  a  cousin’s 
wedding,  the  coming  war  with  the  duke 
of  Saxony,  or  the  means  of  getting  to 
Erfurt,  whither  one  of  them  is  going  when 
he  is  sixteen  to  study  at  the  university. 
The  great  ordeal  of  the  day  was  the  mas¬ 
ter’s  quiz  on  Latin  grammar,  when  every 
one  was  questioned  in  turn  ( auditio  cir - 
culi ).  The  pupils  rehearse  their  declen¬ 
sions  and  conjugations  and  the  idle  begin 

99 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

to  tremble  as  the  hour  draws  near.  There 
is  some  hope  that  the  master  may  not 
come.  “  He  has  guests.”  “  But  they 
will  leave  in  time.”  “  He  may  go  to  the 
baths.”  “  But  it  is  not  yet  a  whole  week 
since  he  was  there  last.”  “  There  he 
comes.  Name  the  wolf,  and  he  forthwith 
appears.”  Finally  the  shaky  scholar  falls 
back  on  his  only  hope,  a  place  near  one 
who  promises  to  prompt  him. 

“  When  the  recitation  is  over  and  the 
lesson  given  out,  rejoicing  begins  among 
the  youth  at  the  approach  of  the  hour  for 
going  home,”  and  they  indulge  in  much 
idle  talk  “  which  is  here  omitted,  lest  it 
furnish  the  means  of  offending.”  Joy  is, 
however,  tempered  by  the  contest  which 
precedes  dismissal,  “  a  serious  and  furious 
disputation  for  the  pahniterium ”  until 
one  secures  the  prize  and  another  has  the 
asinus  to  keep  till  next  day. 

After  school  the  boys  go  to  play  in  the 
churchyard,  the  sports  mentioned  being 
hoops,  marbles  (apparently),  ball  (dur¬ 
ing  Lent),  and  a  kind  of  counting 

100 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 


game.  The  author  distinguishes  hoops 
for  throwing  and  for  rolling,  spheres  of 
wood  and  of  stone,  but  the  subject  soon 
becomes  too  deep  for  his  Latin,  and  in  the 
midst  of  this  topic  the  treatise  comes  to 
an  abrupt  conclusion. 

In  some  of  its  forms  the  student 
manual  touches  on  territory  already  oc¬ 
cupied  by  another  type  of  mediaeval 
handbook,  the  manual  of  manners,  which 
under  such  titles  as  “  The  Book  of  Ur¬ 
banity,”  “  The  Courtesies  of  the  Table,” 
etc.,  enjoyed  much  popularity  from  the 
thirteenth  century  onward.  Such  manuals 
have,  however,  none  of  the  polish  of 
Castiglione’s  Courtier  or  the  elaborate¬ 
ness  of  the  modern  book  of  etiquette. 
Those  who  have  not  mastered  the  use  of 
knife  and  fork  have  little  use  for  the  finer 
points  of  social  intercourse,  and  the  read¬ 
ers  of  the  mediaeval  manuals  were  still 
at  their  a  b  c’s  in  the  matter  of  behavior. 
Wash  your  hands  in  the  morning  and, 
if  you  have  time,  your  face;  use  your 
napkin  and  handkerchief;  eat  with  three 

101 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


fingers,  and  don’t  gorge ;  don’t  be  boister¬ 
ous  or  quarrelsome  at  table;  don’t  stare 
at  your  neighbor  or  his  plate ;  don’t 
criticise  the  food;  don’t  pick  your  teeth 
with  your  knife  —  such,  with  others  still 
more  elementary,  are  the  maxims  which 
meet  us  in  this  period,  in  Latin  and 
French,  in  English,  German,  and  Italian, 
but  regularly  in  verse.  Now  and  then 
there  is  a  further  touch  of  the  age :  scrape 
bones  with  your  knife  but  don’t  gnaw 
them ;  when  you  have  done  with  them,  put 
them  in  a  bowl  or  on  the  floor! 

If  the  correspondence  of  mediaeval 
students  were  preserved  for  us  in  casual 
and  unaffected  detail,  nothing  could  give 
a  more  vivid  picture  of  university  con¬ 
ditions.  Unfortunately  in  some  respects 
for  us,  the  Middle  Ages  were  a  period  of 
forms  and  types  in  letter- writing  as  in 
other  things;  and  for  most  men  the  writ¬ 
ing  of  a  letter  was  less  an  expression  of 
individual  feeling  and  experience  than  it 
was  the  laborious  copying  of  a  letter  of 

102 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 

some  one  else,  altered  where  necessary  to 
suit  the  new  conditions.  And  if  some¬ 
thing  fresh  or  individual  was  produced, 
there  was  small  chance  of  preserving  it, 
since  it  was  on  that  account  all  the  less 
likely  to  be  useful  to  a  future  letter- 
writer  —  “  so  careful  of  the  type,  so  care¬ 
less  of  the  single  ”  letter,  history  seems. 
The  result  is  that  the  hundreds  of  student 
letters  which  have  reached  us  in  the  manu¬ 
scripts  of  the  Middle  Ages  have  come 
down  through  the  medium  of  collections 
of  forms  or  complete  letter-writers,  shorn 
of  most  of  their  individuality  but  for  that 
very  reason  reflecting  the  more  faithfully 
the  fundamental  and  universal  phases  of 
university  life. 

By  far  the  largest  element  in  the  cor¬ 
respondence  of  mediaeval  students  con¬ 
sists  of  requests  for  money;  “  a  student’s 
first  song  is  a  demand  for  money,”  says  a 
weary  father  in  an  Italian  letter-writer, 
“  and  there  will  never  be  a  letter  which 
does  not  ask  for  cash.”  How  to  secure 
this  fundamental  necessity  of  student 

103 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

life  was  doubtless  one  of  the  most  im¬ 
portant  problems  that  confronted  the 
mediaeval  scholar,  and  many  were  the 
models  which  the  rhetoricians  placed  be¬ 
fore  him  in  proof  of  the  practical  advan¬ 
tages  of  their  art.  The  letters  are  gener¬ 
ally  addressed  to  parents,  sometimes  to 
brothers,  uncles,  or  ecclesiastical  patrons; 
a  much  copied  exercise  contained  twenty- 
two  different  methods  of  approaching  an 
archdeacon  on  this  ever-delicate  subject. 
Commonly  the  student  announces  that 
he  is  at  such  and  such  a  centre  of  learning, 
well  and  happy  but  in  desperate  need  of 
money  for  books  and  other  necessary  ex¬ 
penses.  Here  is  a  specimen  from  Oxford, 
somewhat  more  individual  than  the  aver¬ 
age  and  written  in  uncommonly  bad 
Latin : 

“  B.  to  his  venerable  master  A.,  greet¬ 
ing.  This  is  to  inform  you  that  I  am 
studying  at  Oxford  with  the  greatest 
diligence,  but  the  matter  of  money  stands 
greatly  in  the  way  of  my  promotion,  as 
it  is  now  two  months  since  I  spent  the  last 

104 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 

of  what  you  sent  me.  The  city  is  ex¬ 
pensive  and  makes  many  demands;  I 
have  to  rent  lodgings,  buy  necessaries, 
and  provide  for  many  other  things  which 
I  cannot  now  specify.  Wherefore  I  re¬ 
spectfully  beg  your  paternity  that  by  the 
promptings  of  divine  pity  you  may  assist 
me,  so  that  I  may  be  able  to  complete 
what  I  have  well  begun.  For  you  must 
know  that  without  Ceres  and  Bacchus 
Apollo  grows  cold.” 

If  the  father  was  close-fisted,  there 
were  special  reasons  to  be  urged:  the 
town  was  dear  —  as  university  towns 
always  are !  —  the  price  of  living  was  ex¬ 
ceptionally  high  owing  to  a  hard  winter, 
a  siege,  a  failure  of  crops,  or  an  unusual 
number  of  scholars;  the  last  messenger 
had  been  robbed  or  had  absconded  with 
the  money ;  the  son  could  borrow  no  more 
of  his  fellows  or  of  the  Jews;  and  so  on. 
The  student’s  woes  are  depicted  in  mov¬ 
ing  language,  with  many  appeals  to 
paternal  vanity  and  affection.  At  Bo¬ 
logna  we  hear  of  the  terrible  mud  through 

105 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


which  the  youth  must  beg  his  way  from 
door  to  door,  crying,  “  O  good  masters,” 
and  coming  home  empty-handed.  In  an 
Austrian  formulary  a  scholar  writes  from 
the  lowest  depths  of  prison,  where  the 
bread  is  hard  and  moldy,  the  drink  water 
mixed  with  tears,  the  darkness  so  dense 
that  it  can  actually  be  felt.  Another  lies 
on  straw  with  no  covering,  goes  without 
shoes  or  shirt,  and  eats  he  will  not  say  what 
—  a  tale  designed  to  be  addressed  to  a 
sister  and  to  bring  in  response  a  hundred 
sous  tournoiSj  two  pairs  of  sheets,  and 
ten  ells  of  fine  cloth,  all  sent  without  her 
husband’s  knowledge.  “  We  have  made 
little  glosses,  we  owe  money,”  is  the  terse 
summary  of  two  students  at  Chartres. 

To  such  requests  the  proper  answer 
was,  of  course,  an  affectionate  letter, 
commending  the  young  man’s  industry 
and  studious  habits  and  remitting  the  de¬ 
sired  amount.  Sometimes  the  student 
is  cautioned  to  moderate  his  expenses  — 
he  might  have  got  on  longer  with  what  he 
had,  he  should  remember  the  needs  of  his 

106 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 


sisters,  he  ought  to  be  supporting  his 
parents  instead  of  trying  to  extort 
money  from  them,  etc.  One  father  — 
who  quotes  Horace!  —  excuses  himself 
because  of  the  failure  of  his  vineyards.  It 
often  happened,  too,  that  the  father  or 
uncle  has  heard  bad  reports  of  the  stu¬ 
dent,  who  must  then  be  prepared  to  deny 
indignantly  all  such  aspersions  as  the 
unfounded  fabrications  of  his  enemies. 
Here  is  an  example  of  paternal  reproof 
taken  from  an  interesting  collection  re¬ 
lating  to  Franche-Comte : 

“  To  his  son  G.  residing  at  Orleans  P. 
of  Besan^on  sends  greetings  with  pater¬ 
nal  zeal.  It  is  written,  ‘  He  also  that  is 
slothful  in  his  work  is  brother  to  him  that 
is  a  great  waster.’  I  have  recently  dis¬ 
covered  that  you  live  dissolutely  and 
slothfully,  preferring  license  to  restraint 
and  play  to  work  and  strumming  a  guitar 
while  the  others  are  at  their  studies, 
whence  it  happens  that  you  have  read  but 
one  volume  of  law  while  your  more  in¬ 
dustrious  companions  have  read  several. 

107 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


Wherefore  I  have  decided  to  exhort  you 
herewith  to  repent  utterly  of  your  dis¬ 
solute  and  careless  ways,  that  you  may  no 
longer  be  called  a  waster  and  your  shame 
may  be  turned  to  good  repute.” 

In  the  models  of  Ponce  de  Provence 
we  find  a  teacher  writing  to  a  student’s 
father  that  while  the  young  man  is  doing 
well  in  his  studies,  he  is  just  a  trifle  wild 
and  would  be  helped  by  judicious  admo¬ 
nition.  Naturally  the  master  does  not 
wish  it  known  that  the  information  came 
through  him,  so  the  father  writes  his  son: 

“  I  have  learned  —  not  from  your 
master,  although  he  ought  not  to  hide 
such  things  from  me,  but  from  a  certain 
trustworthy  source  —  that  you  do  not 
study  in  your  room  or  act  in  the  schools 
as  a  good  student  should,  but  play  and 
wander  about,  disobedient  to  your  master 
and  indulging  in  sport  and  in  certain 
other  dishonorable  practices  which  I  do 
not  now  care  to  explain  by  letter.”  Then 
follow  the  customary  exhortations  to 
reform. 


108 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 


Two  boys  at  Orleans  thus  describe 
their  arrival  at  this  centre  of  learning: 

“  To  their  dear  and  respected  parents 
M.  Martre,  knight,  and  M.  his  wife,  M. 
and  S.  their  sons  send  greeting  and  filial 
obedience.  This  is  to  inform  you  that,  by 
divine  mercy,  we  are  living  in  good  health 
in  the  city  of  Orleans  and  are  devoting 
ourselves  wholly  to  study,  mindful  of  the 
words  of  Cato,  4  To  know  anything  is 
praiseworthy.’  We  occupy  a  good  dwell¬ 
ing,  next  door  but  one  to  the  schools  and 
market-place,  so  that  we  can  go  to  school 
every  day  without  wetting  our  feet.  We 
have  also  good  companions  in  the  house 
with  us,  well  advanced  in  their  studies 
and  of  excellent  habits  —  an  advantage 
which  we  well  appreciate,  for  as  the 
Psalmist  says,  4  With  an  upright  man 
thou  wilt  show  thyself  upright.’  ” 

Such  youths  were  slow  to  quit  academic 
life.  Again  and  again  they  ask  permis¬ 
sion  to  have  their  term  of  study  extended ; 
war  might  break  out,  parents  or  brothers 
die,  an  inheritance  have  to  be  divided, 


109 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

but  the  student  pleads  always  for  delay. 
He  desires  to  “  serve  longer  in  the  camp 
of  Pallas  in  any  event  he  cannot  leave 
before  Easter,  as  his  masters  have  just 
begun  important  courses  of  lectures.  A 
scholar  is  called  home  from  Siena  to 
marry  a  lady  of  many  attractions ;  he  an¬ 
swers  that  he  deems  it  foolish  to  desert 
the  cause  of  learning  for  the  sake  of  a 
woman,  “for  one  may  always  get  a  wife, 
but  science  once  lost  can  never  be  recov¬ 
ered.” 

The  time  to  leave,  however,  must  come 
at  last,  and  then  the  great  problem  is 
money  for  the  expenses  of  commence¬ 
ment,  or,  as  it  was  then  called,  inception. 
Thus  a  student  at  Paris  asks  a  friend  to 
explain  to  his  father,  “  since  the  simplicity 
of  the  lay  mind  does  not  understand  such 
things,”  how  at  length  after  much  study 
nothing  but  lack  of  money  for  the  incep¬ 
tion  banquet  stands  in  the  way  of  his 
graduation.  From  Orleans  D.  Boterel 
writes  to  his  dear  relatives  at  Tours  that 
he  is  laboring  over  his  last  volume  of  law 

110 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 


and  on  its  completion  will  be  able  to  pass 
to  his  licentiate  provided  they  send  him 
a  hundred  livres  for  the  necessary  ex¬ 
penses.  An  account  of  the  inception  at 
Bologna  was  quoted  in  the  preceding 
chapter.1 

Unlike  the  student  letters,  which  range 
over  the  whole  of  the  later  Middle  Ages, 
mediaeval  student  poetry,  or  rather  the 
best  of  it,  is  limited  to  a  comparatively 
short  period  comprised  roughly  within  the 
years  1125  and  1225,  and  is  closely  con¬ 
nected  with  the  classical  phase  of  the 
twelfth-century  renaissance.  It  is  largely 
the  work  of  the  wandering  clerks  of  the 
period  —  students,  ex-students,  profes¬ 
sors  even  —  moving  from  town  to  town 
in  search  of  learning  and  still  more  of  ad¬ 
venture,  nominally  clerks  but  leading 
often  very  unclerical  lives.  “  Far  from 
their  homes,”  says  Symonds,  “  without 
responsibilities,  light  of  purse  and  light  of 
heart,  careless  and  pleasure-seeking,  they 

1  Supra,  p.  67. 

Ill 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

ran  a  free,  disreputable  course.”  44  They 
are  wont,”  writes  a  monk  of  the  twelfth 
century,  4  4  to  roam  about  the  world  and 
visit  all  its  cities,  till  much  learning  makes 
them  mad;  for  in  Paris  they  seek  liberal 
arts,  in  Orleans  classics,  at  Salerno  medi¬ 
cine,  at  Toledo  magic,  but  nowhere  man¬ 
ners  and  morals.”  Their  chief  habitat, 
however,  was  northern  France,  the  center 
of  the  new  literary  renaissance. 

Possibly  from  some  obscure  allusion  to 
Goliath  the  Philistine,  these  wandering 
clerks  took  the  name  Goliardi  and  their 
verse  is  generally  known  as  Goliardic  po¬ 
etry.  This  literature  is  for  the  most 
part  anonymous,  though  recent  research 
has  individualized  certain  writers  of  the 
group,  notably  a  Master  Hugh,  canon  of 
Orleans,  ca.  1142,  styled  the  Primate,  and 
the  so-called  Archpoet.  The  Primate, 
mordant,  diabolically  clever,  thoroughly 
disreputable,  became  famous  for  genera¬ 
tions  as  44  an  admirable  improviser,  who  if 
he  had  but  turned  his  heart  to  the  love  of 
God  would  have  had  a  great  place  in  di- 

112 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 


vine  letters  and  have  proved  most  useful 
to  God’s  church.”  The  Archpoet  is  found 
chiefly  in  Italy  from  1161  to  1165,  going 
“  on  his  own  ”  in  spring  and  summer  but 
when  autumn  comes  on  turning  to  beg 
shirt  and  cloak  from  his  patron,  the  arch¬ 
bishop  of  Cologne.  Ordered  to  compose 
an  epic  for  the  emperor  in  a  week,  he  re¬ 
plies  he  cannot  write  on  an  empty  stomach 
—  the  quality  of  his  verse  depends  on  the 
quality  of  his  wine: 

Tales  versus  facio  quale  vinum  bibo. 

Good  wine  he  must  at  times  have  found, 
for  he  composed  the  masterpiece  of  the 
whole  school,  the  Confession  of  a  Goliard, 
that  unforgettable  description  of  the 
burning  temptations  of  Pavia  which  con¬ 
tains  the  famous  glorification  of  the  joys 
of  the  tavern: 

In  the  public  house  to  die 
Is  my  resolution ; 

Let  wine  to  my  lips  be  nigh 
At  life’s  dissolution ; 

113 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


That  will  make  the  angels  cry, 

With  glad  elocution, 
u  Grant  this  toper,  God  on  high, 

Grace  and  absolution ! 99 

Though  written  in  Latin,  the  Goliardic 
verse  has  abandoned  the  ancient  metrical 
system  for  the  rhyme  and  accent  of  mod^ 
ern  poetry,  but  even  the  best  of  modem 
versions,  such  as  those  of  John  Addington 
Symonds,  from  which  I  am  quoting,  fail 
to  render  the  swing,  the  lilt,  the  rhyth¬ 
mical  flow  of  the  original.  Its  authors 
are  familiar  with  classical  mythology  and 
especially  with  the  writings  of  Ovid, 
whose  precepts,  copied  even  in  severe 
Cluny,  were  freely  followed.  Most  of 
all  is  this  poetry  classical  in  its  frankly 
pagan  view  of  life.  Its  gods  are  Venus 
and  Bacchus,  also  Decius,  the  god  of  dice. 
Love  and  wine  and  spring,  life  on  the 
open  road  and  under  the  blue  sky,  these 
are  the  common  subjects;  the  spirit  is 
that  of  an  intense  delight  in  the  world  that 
is,  a  joy  in  mere  living,  such  as  one  finds 

114 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 


in  the  Greek  and  Roman  poets  or  in  that 
sonorous  song  of  a  later  age  which  the 
academic  world  still  cherishes, 

Gaudeamus  igitur  iuvenes  dum  sumus. 

In  general  the  Goliardic  poetry  is  of  an 
impersonal  sort,  giving  us  few  details 
from  any  particular  place,  but  reflecting 
the  gayer,  more  jovial,  less  reputable  side 
of  the  life  of  mediaeval  clerks.  The  wor¬ 
shipful  order  of  vagrants  is  described, 
open  to  men  of  every  condition  and  every 
clime,  with  its  rules  which  are  no  rules, 
late-risers,  gamesters,  roysterers,  proud 
that  none  of  its  members  has  more  than 
one  coat  to  his  back,  begging  their  way 
from  town  to  town  with  requests  for 
money  which  sound  like  students’  letters 
in  verse: 

I,  a  wandering  scholar  lad, 

Born  for  toil  and  sadness, 

Oftentimes  am  driven  by 
Poverty  to  madness. 


115 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


Literature  and  knowledge  I 
Fain  would  still  be  earning, 

Were  it  not  that  want  of  pelf 
Makes  me  cease  from  learning. 

These  torn  clothes  that  cover  me 
Are  too  thin  and  rotten; 

Oft  I  have  to  suffer  cold, 

By  the  warmth  forgotten. 

Scarce  I  can  attend  at  church, 
Sing  God’s  praises  duly ; 

Mass  and  vespers  both  I  miss, 
Though  I  love  them  truly. 

Oh,  thou  pride  of  N - , 

By  thy  worth  I  pray  thee 

Give  the  suppliant  help  in  need, 
Heaven  will  sure  repay  thee. 

Take  a  mind  unto  thee  now 
Like  unto  St.  Martin ; 

Clothe  the  pilgrim’s  nakedness, 
Wish  him  well  at  parting. 

So  may  God  translate  your  soul 
Into  peace  eternal, 

And  the  bliss  of  saints  be  yours 
In  His  realm  supernal. 


116 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 


The  brethren  greet  each  other  at  wayside 
taverns  with  songs  like  this : 

We  in  our  wandering, 

Blithesome  and  squandering, 

Tara,  tantara,  teino ! 

Eat  to  satiety, 

Drink  with  propriety ; 

Tara,  tantara,  teino ! 

Laugh  till  our  sides  we  split, 

Rags  on  our  hides  we  fit; 

Tara,  tantara,  teino! 

Jesting  eternally, 

Quaffing  infernally: 

Tara,  tantara,  teino ! 

etc. 

The  assembled  topers  are  described  in 
another  poem: 

Some  are  gaming,  some  are  drinking, 

Some  are  living  without  thinking; 

And  of  those  who  make  the  racket, 

Some  are  stripped  of  coat  and  jacket; 
Some  get  clothes  of  finer  feather, 

Some  are  cleaned  out  altogether ; 

No  one  there  dreads  death’s  invasion, 

But  all  drink  in  emulation. 


117 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

Then  they  sacrilegiously  drink  once  for 
all  prisoners  and  captives,  three  times  for 
the  living,  a  fourth  time  for  the  whole 
body  of  Christians,  a  fifth  for  those  de¬ 
parted  in  the  faith,  and  so  on  to  the  thir¬ 
teenth  for  those  who  travel  by  land  or 
water,  and  a  final  and  unlimited  potation 
for  king  and  Pope.  Such  poetry  is  plainly 
the  expression  of  a  ‘  wet 5  age. 

Often  bibulous  and  erotic,  the  Goli- 
ardic  verse  contains  a  large  amount  of 
parody  and  satire.  Appealing  to  a  pub¬ 
lic  familiar  with  scripture  and  liturgy,  its 
authors  parody  anything  —  the  Bible, 
hymns  to  the  Virgin,  the  canon  of  the 
mass,  as  in  the  “  Drinkers’  Mass  ”  and 
the  “  Office  for  Gamblers.”  One  of  the 
best-known  pieces  is  a  satire  on  the  Pa¬ 
pacy  under  the  caption  of  “  The  Gospel 
according  to  Mark-s  of  silver.”  This  is 
only  one  of  many  bitter  attacks  on  Rome, 
while  the  pride,  hardness,  and  greed  of  the 
higher  clergy  are  portrayed  in  “  Golias 
the  Bishop.”  The  point  of  view  in  gen¬ 
eral  is  that  of  the  lower  clergy,  especially 

118 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 

the  looser,  wandering,  undisciplined  ele¬ 
ment  which  frequented  the  schools  and  the 
roads,  the  jongleurs  of  the  clerical  world, 
familiar  subjects  of  ecclesiastical  legisla¬ 
tion  since  the  ninth  century. 

Poetry  of  this  sort  is  so  contrary  to 
conventional  conceptions  of  the  Middle 
Ages  that  some  writers  have  denied  its 
mediaeval  character.  “  It  is,”  says  one, 
“  mediaeval  only  in  the  chronological 
sense,”  while  others  find  in  it  close  affini¬ 
ties  with  the  spirit  of  the  Renaissance  or 
of  the  Reformation.  It  would  be  more 
consonant  with  the  spirit  of  history  to 
enlarge  our  ideas  of  the  Middle  Ages  so 
as  to  correspond  to  the  facts  of  mediaeval 
life.  The  Goliardi  were  neither  human¬ 
ists  before  the  Renaissance  nor  reformers 
before  the  Reformation ;  they  were  simply 
men  of  the  Middle  Ages  who  wrote  for 
their  own  time.  If  the  writings  of  these 
northern  and  chiefly  French  clerks  seem 
to  anticipate  the  Italian  Renaissance,  it 
may  be  that  the  Renaissance  began  earlier 
and  was  less  specifically  Italian  than  has 

119 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

been  supposed.  If  the  authors  are  more 
secular,  even  more  earthy,  than  we  should 
expect  clerks  to  be,  we  must  learn  to  ex¬ 
pect  something  different.  In  lyric  poetry, 
as  in  the  epic  and  the  drama,  we  are  now 
learning  more  of  the  close  interpenetra¬ 
tion  of  the  lay  and  ecclesiastical  worlds, 
no  longer  separated  by  the  air-tight  parti¬ 
tions  which  the  imagination  of  a  later  day 
interposed.  And  whether  their  spirit  was 
lay  or  ecclesiastical,  the  Goliardi  were  cer¬ 
tainly  human;  they  saw  and  felt  life 
keenly,  and  they  wrote  of  what  they  knew. 

It  is  time  to  redress  the  balance  with  a 
word  about  a  less  obtrusive  element,  the 
good  student.  “  The  life  of  the  virtuous 
student,”  says  Dean  Rashdall,  “  has  no 
annals,” 1  and  in  all  ages  he  has  been  less 
conspicuous  than  his  more  dashing  fel¬ 
lows.  Thus  the  ideal  scholar  of  the  ser¬ 
mons  is  a  bit  colorless  but  obedient,  re¬ 
spectful,  eager  to  learn,  assiduous  at 
lectures,  and  bold  in  debate,  pondering  his 

1  Universities,  II,  p.  692. 

120 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 

lessons  even  during  his  evening  prom¬ 
enades  by  the  river.  The  ideal  student  of 
the  manuals  is  he  who  practices  their  pre¬ 
cepts.  The  typical  student  of  the  letters 
has  already  described  himself  as  devoted 
wholly  to  study,  though  somewhat  short 
of  money.  The  good  student  of  the  poems 
—  there  is  no  such  person!  Student 
poetry  was  “  not  all  bacchic  or  erotic  or 
profane,”  1  but  much  of  it  was,  and  we 
must  not  look  here  for  the  more  serious 
side  of  academic  life.  Jean  de  Haute- 
ville’s  account  of  the  poor  and  industrious 
scholar  is  representative  of  a  large  class  of 
students  but  not  of  a  large  body  of  poetry. 
The  good  student’s  occupations  are  best 
reflected  in  the  course  of  study,  his  assi¬ 
duity  best  seen  in  his  note-books  and  dis¬ 
putations.  The  documents  which  concern 
the  educational  side  of  the  university  are 
also  a  source  for  student  life !  It  has  been 
observed  that  the  alumni  reunions  of  our 
own  day  are  often  more  prolific  in  rec¬ 
ollections  of  student  escapades  than  of 

1  Jb.,  II,  p.  686,  note. 

121 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

the  daily  performance  of  the  allotted 
task.  The  studious  lad  of  today  never 
breaks  into  the  headlines  as  such,  and 
no  one  has  seen  fit  to  produce  a  play 
or  a  film  “  featuring  the  good  student.” 
Yet  everyone  familiar  with  contem¬ 
porary  universities  knows  that  the  se¬ 
rious  student  exists  in  large  numbers, 
and  it  has  been  shown  conclusively  that 
the  distinction  he  there  achieves  reflects 
itself  in  his  later  life.  So  it  was  in  the 
Middle  Ages.  The  law  students  of  Bo¬ 
logna  insisted  on  their  money’s  worth  of 
teaching  from  their  professors.  The  ex¬ 
aminations  described  by  Robert  de  Sor- 
bon  required  serious  preparation.  Not 
only  was  the  vocational  motive  a  strong 
incentive  to  study  in  the  mediaeval  uni¬ 
versity,  but  there  was  much  enthusiasm 
for  knowledge  and  much  discussion  of  in¬ 
tellectual  subjects.  The  greater  univer¬ 
sities,  at  least,  were  intellectually  very 
much  alive,  with  something  of  that  ‘  re¬ 
ligion  of  learning  ’  which  had  earlier 
called  Abelard’s  pupils  into  the  wilder- 

122 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 

ness,  there  to  build  themselves  huts  that 
they  might  feed  upon  his  words.  The 
books  of  the  age  were  in  large  measure 
written  by  its  professors,  and  the  students 
had  the  advantage  of  seeing  them  in  the 
making  and  thus  drinking  of  learning 
at  its  fountain-head.  Then  as  now,  the 
moral  quality  of  a  university  depended 
on  the  intensity  and  seriousness  of  its 
intellectual  life. 

If  we  consider  the  body  of  student  lit¬ 
erature  as  a  whole,  its  most  striking,  and 
its  most  disappointing,  characteristic  is 
its  lack  of  individuality.  The  Manuale 
Scholarium  is  written  for  the  use  of  all 
scholars  who  propose  to  attend  univer¬ 
sities  of  students.  The  letters  are  made 
as  general  as  possible  in  order  to  fit  the 
need  of  any  student  who  wants  money, 
clothes,  or  books.  Even  the  poems,  where 
we  have  some  right  to  expect  personal  ex¬ 
pression  of  feeling,  have  the  generic  char¬ 
acter  of  most  mediaeval  poetry;  they  are 
for  the  most  part  the  voice  of  a  class,  not 
of  individuals. 


123 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

At  the  same  time  it  must  be  remem¬ 
bered  that  this  characteristic  of  the  stu¬ 
dent  productions,  if  it  robs  them  of  some¬ 
thing  of  their  interest,  increases  their 
historical  value.  The  historian  deals 
with  the  general  rather  than  the  par¬ 
ticular,  and  his  knowledge  must  be 
built  up  by  a  painful  collection  and 
comparison  of  individual  facts,  which 
are  often  too  few  or  too  unlike  to 
admit  of  sound  generalization.  In  the 
case  of  these  student  records,  how¬ 
ever,  that  labor  has  already  been  per¬ 
formed  for  him ;  in  the  form  in  which  they 
come  down  to  us  they  have  lost,  at  the 
hands  of  the  students  themselves,  what 
is  local  and  peculiar  and  exceptional,  and 
have  become,  what  in  view  of  the  nature 
of  our  information  no  historian  could 
hope  to  make  them,  the  generalized  ex¬ 
perience  of  centuries  of  student  life. 

It  is  this  broadly  human  quality  that 
gives  the  productions  of  the  mediaeval 
student  a  special  interest  for  the  world  of 
today.  In  substance,  though  not  in 

124 


THE  MEDIAEVAL  STUDENT 

form,  many  of  them  are  almost  as  repre¬ 
sentative  of  modern  Harvard  or  Yale  as 
of  mediaeval  Oxford  or  Paris.  The 
Latin  dialogue  and  disputation,  the  mud 
of  Bologna,  and  the  money-changers  of 
the  Grand-Pont,  belong  plainly  in  the 
Middle  Ages  and  not  in  our  time;  but 
money  and  clothing,  rooms,  teachers,  and 
books,  good  cheer  and  good  fellowship, 
have  been  subjects  of  interest  at  all  times 
and  all  places.  A  professor  of  history 
once  said  that  the  greatest  difficulty  of 
historical  teaching  lay  in  convincing 
pupils  that  the  events  of  the  past  did  not 
all  happen  in  the  moon.  The  Middle 
Ages  are  very  far  away,  farther  from  us 
in  some  respects  than  is  classical  an¬ 
tiquity,  and  it  is  very  hard  to  realize  that 
men  and  women,  then  and  now,  are  after 
all  much  the  same  human  beings.  We 
need  constantly  to  be  reminded  that  the 
fundamental  factors  in  man’s  develop¬ 
ment  remain  much  the  same  from  age  to 
age  and  must  so  remain  as  long  as  human 
nature  and  physical  environment  continue 

125 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 

what  they  have  been.  In  his  relations  to 
life  and  learning  the  mediaeval  student 
resembled  his  modern  successor  far  more 
than  is  often  supposed.  If  his  environ¬ 
ment  was  different,  his  problems  were 
much  the  same;  if  his  morals  were  per¬ 
haps  worse,  his  ambition  was  as  active, 
his  rivalries  as  intense,  his  desire  for  learn¬ 
ing  quite  as  keen.  And  for  him  as  for 
us,  intellectual  achievement  meant  mem¬ 
bership  in  that  city  of  letters  not  made 
with  hands,  “  the  ancient  and  universal 
company  of  scholars.’’ 


* 


126 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

i 

The  standard  work  on  mediaeval  universities 
is  Hastings  Rashdall,  The  Universities  of  Eu¬ 
rope  in  the  Middle  Ages  (Oxford,  1895;  new 
edition  in  preparation),  to  which  my  indebted¬ 
ness  will  be  apparent  throughout.  The  later 
literature  can  be  most  easily  found  in  L.  J. 
Paetow,  Guide  to  the  Study  of  Mediaeval  His¬ 
tory  (Berkeley,  1917).  Important  materials 
are  conveniently  accessible  in  translation  in 
D.  C.  Munro,  The  Mediaeval  Student  (Phila¬ 
delphia,  1895)  ;  and  A.  O.  Norton,  Readings 
in  the  History  of  Education:  Mediaeval  Uni¬ 
versities  (Cambridge,  Mass.,  1909).  Bologna 
now  has  a  cartulary  and  a  special  series  of 
Studi  e  Memorie  (both  since  1907)  ;  while  the 
municipal  history  of  the  early  period  has  been 
studied  by  A.  Hessel,  Geschichte  der  Stadt  Bo¬ 
logna  von  1116  his  1880  (Berlin,  1910).  Light 
has  recently  been  thrown  on  Salerno  by  the 
studies  of  Giacosa  and  Sudhoff  and  the  dis¬ 
sertations  of  SudhofPs  pupils ;  its  most  popular 
product,  The  School  of  Salernum ,  can  be  read 

127 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


in  the  quaint  English  version  of  Sir  John  Har¬ 
rington,  recently  reprinted  (London,  1922) 
with  a  good  note  by  F.  H.  Garrison  and  a  less 
valuable  preface  by  Francis  R.  Packard. 
Paris  still  lacks  a  modern  historian ;  Mullinger 
is  still  the  standard  work  on  Cambridge;  while 
Oxford  can  best  be  studied  in  Rashdall,  supple¬ 
mented,  as  in  the  case  of  Cambridge,  by  the 
histories  of  the  several  colleges. 

n 

The  most  useful  general  work  on  the  content 
of  mediaeval  learning  is  Henry  Osborn  Taylor, 
The  Mediaeval  Mind  (third  edition,  New  York, 
1919).  This  may  be  supplemented  by  R.  L. 
Poole,  Illustrations  of  the  History  of  Mediae¬ 
val  Thought  and  Learning  (second  edition, 
London,  1920)  ;  M.  Grabmann,  Geschichte  der 
scholastischen  Methode  (Freiburg,  1909-11)  ; 
Sir  J.  E.  Sandys,  History  of  Classical  Scholar¬ 
ship,  I  (third  edition,  Cambridge,  1921)  ;  Lynn 
Thorndike,  History  of  Magic  and  Experimen¬ 
tal  Science  (New  York,  1923)  ;  Pierre  Duhem, 
Le  systeme  du  monde  de  Platon  a  Copernic ,  II- 
V  (Paris,  1914-17) ;  Charles  H.  Haskins, 
Studies  in  the  History  of  Mediaeval  Science  (in 
press,  Harvard  University  Press)  ;  the  stand¬ 
ard  histories  of  philosophy,  mathematics,  law, 

128 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

and  medicine;  and  the  more  special  literature 
in  Paetow’s  Guide ,  including  his  own  study  of 
the  Arts  Course  (Urbana,  1910)  and  his  edi¬ 
tion  of  the  Battle  of  the  Seven  Arts  (Berkeley, 
1914).  For  a  sample  of  Abelard’s  Sic  et  Non, 
see  Norton,  Readings ,  pp.  20-25.  Abelard’s 
method  can  be  followed  further  in  the  logical 
writings  edited  for  the  first  time  by  B.  Geyer 
in  Baeumker’s  Beitrage  zur  Geschichte  der 
Philosopliie  des  Mittalalters,  XXI  (Munster, 
1919  ff.).  The  best  account  of  the  class-rooms 
of  a  mediaeval  university  is  F.  Cavazza,  Le 
scuole  delV  antico  studio  bolognese  (Milan, 
1896).  Robert  de  Sorbon’s  De  conscientia  is 
edited  by  Chambon  (Paris,  1903). 

m 

Brief  sketches  of  student  life  will  be  found 
in  the  last  chapter  of  Rashdall  and  in  the  little 
volume  of  R.  S.  Rait,  Life  in  the  Mediaeval 
University  (Cambridge,  1912).  In  the  text 
I  have  drawn  freely  from  an  article  of  my  own 
on  student  letters  ( American  Historical  Re¬ 
view ,  in,  Pp.  203-229)  and  from  one  on  the 
Paris  sermons  (ib.,  X,  pp.  1-27).  John  of 
Garlande’s  Dictionary  will  be  found  most  con¬ 
veniently  in  T.  Wright,  A  Volume  of  Vocabu¬ 
laries  (London,  1882),  pp.  120-138;  he  also 

129 


THE  RISE  OF  UNIVERSITIES 


wrote  a  Morale  Scolarium  of  which  Paetow  is 
preparing  an  edition.  The  Manuale  Schola - 
rium  has  been  translated  and  annotated  by  R. 
F.  Seybolt  (Harvard  University  Press,  1921). 
Statuta  vel  Precepta  Scolarium  have  been 
edited  by  M.  Weingart  (Metten,  1894)  and  by 
P.  Bahlmann  in  Mitteilungen  der  Gesellschaft 
fiir  deutsche  Erziehungs-  und  Schulgeschichte , 
III,  pp.  129-145  (1893).  The  latest  dis¬ 
cussion  of  mediaeval  manuals  of  man¬ 
ners  is  by  S.  Glixelli,  in  Romania ,  XLVII, 
pp.  1-40  (1921).  The  best  single  collection  of 
Goliardic  verse  is  J.  A.  Schmeller,  Carmina 
Burana  (Breslau,  1894)  ;  the  best  translations 
are  those  of  J.  A.  Symonds,  Wine,  Women,  and 
Song.  Two  poets  have  since  been  individu¬ 
alized,  the  Primate  by  Leopold  Delisle  and  W. 
Meyer,  the  Archpoet  by  B.  Schmeidler  and  M. 
Manitius.  For  an  introduction  to  the  vast  lit¬ 
erature  of  Goliardic  poetry,  see  Paetow’s 
Guide,  pp.  449  f. ;  P.  S.  Allen,  in  Modern  Phi¬ 
lology,  V,  VI ;  and  H.  Siissmilch,  Lateinische 
Vagantenpoesie  (Leipzig,  1917).  On  the 
origin  of  the  word  4  Goliardi,’  see  James  West- 
fall  Thompson,  in  the  Studies  in  Philology, 
published  by  the  University  of  North  Carolina, 
XX,  pp.  83-98  (1923). 


130 


INDEX 


INDEX 


Abelard,  20,  21,  54-56,  72, 
122,  129. 

Albertus  Magnus,  68. 

Alcuin,  54. 

Alfred,  King,  6. 

Allen,  P.  S.,  130. 

Anselm,  70. 

Arabic  learning,  8,  47,  73. 
Archpoet,  112-114,  130. 
Aristotle,  8,  39,  41,  42,  46, 
55,  72-74. 

Arnold,  Matthew,  quoted,  32. 
Arts,  seven,  7,  37-46. 
Averroes,  73,  74. 

Avicenna,  47. 

Bede,  39. 

Berlin,  30. 

Bernard  of  Chartres,  19,  56. 
Besangon,  107. 

Bible,  47,  52. 

Boethius,  8,  39. 

Bologna,  4-6,  10-18,  24,  27, 
30,  32,  34,  44,  48,  49,  52, 
56-63,  66,  67,  81,  105,  111, 
122,  127. 

Bonaventura,  68. 

Books,  control  of,  14,  51-53. 
Brown  University,  30,  31. 
Bryce,  James,  quoted,  35. 
Buoncompagni,  44,  57,  62, 67. 


Cambridge,  28, 30, 32, 34, 128. 
Cathedral  schools,  9,  19-21. 
Cavazza,  F.,  129. 

Chancellor,  21,  23,  47,  63-66, 
74. 

Charlemagne,  6,  54. 

Chartres,  19,  20,  39,  56,  57, 
106. 

Chaucer,  9,  41,  52,  87,  88. 
Classics,  39-41,  54-56,  112, 
114. 

Class-rooms,  61,  62. 

Coimbra,  30,  33,  34. 

Colleges,  26-28,  32-35,53,82. 
Corpus  Juris  Civilis,  11,  12, 
48,  58-61. 

Cracow,  30. 

Cujas,  76. 

Dante,  quoted,  42,  51,  62. 
Degrees,  17,  35. 

Denifle,  H.,  7. 

Dominicans,  68. 

Donatus,  39. 

Duhem,  P.,  128. 

Edinburgh,  30. 

Erfurt,  99. 

Etienne  de  Tournay,  71. 
Euclid,  8,  39. 

Examinations,  17, 63-67, 122 


131 


INDEX 


Franciscans,  68,  75. 

Frederick  Barbarossa,  13, 
113. 

Frederick  II,  10,  18. 
Freedom,  academic,  69-78. 

Galen,  45,  47. 

Galileo,  19. 

Gerbert,  54. 

Germany,  universities  and 
schools  of,  28-30,  66,  92- 
101. 

Gilbert  de  la  Porree,  72. 
Gilds,  13-17. 

Glixelli,  S.,  130. 

Glossators,  12,  49-51. 
Goliardi,  112-120,  130. 
Grabmann,  M.,  128. 

Gratian,  12,  50,  51,  55. 
Gregory  IX,  22,  51,  70. 

Haskins,  C.  H.,  128,  129. 
Heidelberg,  29,  92-95. 

Henri  d’Andeli,  40,  129. 
Hessel,  A.,  127. 

Hildebert,  40. 

Hippocrates,  9,  19,  47. 

Inception,  67,  110,  111. 
Irnerius,  12. 

Jacques  de  Vitry,  quoted, 
25. 

John  of  Brescain,  74. 

John  of  Garlande,  57,  90-92, 
129,  130. 

John  of  Hauteville,  87. 


John  of  Salisbury,  19,  40, 
55-57. 

Laon,  19. 

Latin,  use  of,  89-102. 

Law,  Canon,  12,  19,  24,  41, 
50,  51. 

Law,  Roman,  8,  10-18,  24, 
41,  48-50,  58-61. 

Leipzig,  30,  82. 

Letters,  student,  102-111. 
Libraries,  4,  51-53. 

Li&ge,  19. 

Logic,  41-43,  56,  57. 

London,  30. 

Lorenzo  of  Aquileia,  57. 
Louvain,  30. 

Lowell,  J.  R.,  quoted,  20. 

Maitland,  F.  W.,  quoted,  11. 
Manchester,  30. 

Manuale  Scholarium,  92-94, 
123,  130. 

Manuals  of  manners,  101, 
102,  130. 

Martianus  Capella,  38. 
Medicine,  8-10,  19,  24,  47, 
48,  127. 

Montpellier,  18,  30,  32,  48. 
Munro,  D.  C.,  25,  127. 

Naples,  18,  57. 

Nations,  24-26. 

Nigel  Wireker,  87. 
Nominalism  and  realism, 
77,  78,  93. 

Norton,  A.  O.,  56,  127,  129. 


132 


INDEX 


Odofredus,  58-61. 

Orleans,  18,  19,  32,  39-41, 
57,  83,  107-112. 

Oxford,  6,  9,  28,  30,  32-34, 
52,  53,  75,  81,  82,  88, 
104,  128. 

Padua,  16,  18,  30,  31,  34. 

Paetow,  L.  J.,  127,  129,  130. 

Palermo,  16. 

Paris,  4-6,  12,  19-30,  32,  34, 
41-45,  52,  53,  56,  57,  63- 
66,  73-75,  83-88,  90-92, 
97,  112,  128. 

Parody,  118. 

Pavia,  113. 

Pepo,  12. 

Peter  Lombard,  47. 

Philip  Augustus,  22. 

Poetry,  student,  111-120. 

Ponce  of  Provence,  57,  108. 

Poole,  R.  L.,  56,  128. 

Prague,  30. 

Primate,  112,  130. 

Priscian,  39. 

Professors,  15-17,  54-78. 

Ptolemy,  8,  39. 

Quadrivium,  7,  37. 

Rait,  R.  S.,  129. 

Rashdall,  H.,  7, 127;  quoted, 
27,  29,  34,  36,  49,  61,  120, 
121. 

Raymond,  Master,  74. 

Renaissance,  of  twelfth  cen¬ 
tury,  7-12,  111,  112. 


Rheims,  19. 

Rhetoric,  40,  43-45,  103. 

Richer,  19,  54. 

Robert  de  Sorbon,  27,  34, 
63-66,  122,  129. 

Ruprecht,  29. 

Rutebeuf,  87. 

Salamanca,  30. 

Salerno,  9,  10,  30,  31,  112, 
127. 

Sandy s,  J.  E.,  128. 

Savigny,  F.  K.  von,  61. 

Schools,  cathedral,  19-21; 
grammar,  95-101. 

Sermons,  Paris,  82-87. 

Socrates,  3. 

Sorbonne,  27,  34,  53. 

Spain,  8,  18,  27,  30. 

Strasbourg,  30. 

Students,  13-15,79-126;  stu¬ 
dents,  letters  by,  102-111; 
students,  manuals  for,  89- 
102;  students,  poems  con¬ 
cerning,  87,  88,  111-120; 
students,  sermons  concern¬ 
ing,  82-87. 

Sudhoff,  K.,  127. 

Sussmilch,  H.,  130. 

Symonds,  J.  A.,  Ill,  114, 130. 

Taylor,  H.  O.,  54,  128. 

Textbooks,  37-53. 

Theodosius  II,  6. 

Theology,  12,  24,  28,  46,  47, 
72-78. 

Thomas  Aquinas,  55,  68,  73. 


133 


INDEX 


Thompson.  J.  W.,  130. 
Thorndike,  L.,  128. 

Toledo,  112. 

Toulouse,  45. 

Tours,  54,  110. 

Trivium,  7,  37. 

United  States,  university  tra¬ 
dition  in,  30-36,  125. 


Universities,  characterized 
and  defined,  4,  5,  9,  13, 
14;  number  of,  29,  30; 
origin  of,  5-29;  studies  of, 
37-51;  teaching  in,  54-78; 
tradition  of,  31-36. 

Vienna,  30. 

William  of  Conches,  56. 


134 


